Missing
by greenstuff2
Summary: Why won't Molly tell anyone who or what she's hiding from and why?
1. Chapter 1

Disclaimer: All rights belong to TG and the BBC

 **Author's notes: Although the characters remain the same, the timetable and the course of events that lead to them getting to know each other is different … so I hope that you can suspend what you know and enjoy watching their story unfold.**

 **Prologue**

Molly rolled over and tried to open one eye which was so swollen that it appeared to be glued shut as she slowly became aware that for the second time in a few months she'd woken up wrapped in the arms of someone who she thought was probably one of the most attractive men on the planet. The only difference was that last time they'd both been naked, limbs entwined in a post-coital glow in his king-sized bed in Bath and that this time she was wearing her bra and knickers and he appeared to be fully dressed, minus his shoes and jacket. They were in her small double bed with it's cheap bobbly sheets in a grotty little room just off the seafront in Weston Super Mare, a room that smelt of drains and that the last thing she remembered actually saying to him the night before was "sod off" …

 **Hiding In Plain Sight**

"But Mum, how much do you actually know about her?"

"As much as I need to know, honestly Charles, what on earth is all this about?"

"Rebecca called me, she's worried, she said that you hadn't done any references or anything, that you don't know anything about this girl at all, and that she's not the sort of girl you'd normally have anything to do with, not someone you'd normally pick. Becca says that she's common, that she swears like a trooper and that she's not sure about Sam being around her, either"

"Rebecca is a nosy, spiteful old cat and it's got nothing whatsoever to do with her, and Sam is perfectly safe for heaven's sake. Do you think I'd let anything happen to him?"

"She's only worried Mum"

"Is she? Is she really? Well, if she's that worried let her come and help your Dad have a shower and get on and off the lavatory and help me to do stuff, to get dressed and to peel the potatoes and so on. No? I thought not"

Molly stood just out of sight and listened to her employer's Skype conversation with her son who was in the army serving in Afghanistan. She wanted to go in and high five her, gently because of her damaged wrist, then tell the snotty posh bastard of a Rupert she could hear talking to his mum that he had nothing at all to worry about, that she'd be long gone well before he got home. She'd been appalled the first day she'd started working here to see all the photographs all over the shop of their beloved only son in army fatigues and dress uniform, photographs of his passing out parade at Sandhurst and on the tarmac at Brize Norton, the place was stuffed full of them, and the last place she would have picked to hide was the home of a serving soldier, and a bloody Rupert at that. Mind you, what was it they called it, hiding in plain sight? Anyway she had no intentions of hanging around here when he got home, it wasn't worth the risk.

Molly Dawes, or Maggie Dawkins as she called herself now, had got the job after a friend of a friend who lived in Batheaston, an almost village near Bath had pointed her in the direction of the James' cleaning lady who had been telling everyone in the pub about this lovely couple she worked for who'd had this terrible car accident on their way home from holiday in France, and who needed some help desperately.

The phone call from her mate had seen Molly apply for the job, it was perfect for what she needed, live-in and temporary, and far enough away from London so that there was no risk of bumping into anyone who would recognise her. She'd still taken the precaution of having her long dark hair cut much shorter and died red, so that she got a huge shock when she caught a glimpse of herself in a shop window or a mirror and which she now felt was possibly a massive over-reaction. Mr J had broken both his legs and his pelvis so that he was stuck in a wheelchair for the time being and couldn't even get on and off the loo without help and despite her lack of inches Molly was fit and strong enough to help him easily and Mrs J had broken one arm and had the other wrist in plaster as well which meant that she couldn't do up her own bra or pull up her own knickers or even make a cup of tea without help. The job didn't have a salary as such, which suited Molly down to the ground because then she didn't need to bother with tax or any of that shit, but it included her accommodation and food with just a small amount of pocket money which they paid her in cash, which meant that no-one would be able to trace her. She imagined that they probably thought that she was some kind of benefits cheat, but that couldn't be helped.

She'd enjoyed the time she'd been there and had stopped expecting someone to come knocking on the door any second looking for her, or at least she had enjoyed it before the ex daughter-in-law and grandson had got home from a month's holiday in South Africa and had taken to visiting almost on a daily basis. To say Rebecca seemed deeply suspicious of her was an understatement, Molly thought she was like one of them sodding Nazi gestapo people with all her questions and she was another good reason why moving on sooner rather than later was looking like an attractive option, maybe even before the snotty Rupert finished his tour and came home. Their little boy, Sam, was cute if a bit bloody precocious, and very, very sure of himself, not a bit shy about speaking up, but then what else would you expect with a Nazi gestapo officer for a mum.

There was probably only about two weeks left before she'd have to start making tracks to find something else, and in one way it felt like a shame because it was a lovely place to live and she'd enjoyed it enough to relax a bit, but on the other, she'd already started thinking about what the fuck she could do next, knowing that any sort of proper job would need her to use her real name and that was a massive bloody problem. She began to work out how she could go about getting some seasonal work "off the books" in one of the seaside resorts.

Shit, shit, shittin' shit, she stood in the kitchen and swore under her breath as the two army officers that had just turned up on the doorstep spoke to Mrs J and then came in. Molly couldn't believe how unlucky she was, that she'd been so close to moving on when they'd found her, so that she weighed up the relative merits of trying to hide somewhere in the house against legging it out of the back door across the garden. Legging it would be crap, it was cold, she had no shoes on and it was raining, on top of which her coat, money and everything else was upstairs, and she hadn't a clue where she could go, but hiding was only a good option as long as they didn't have a search warrant which she wasn't sure whether they would have or not, so she held her breath and tried her best to listen in to what they were saying.

She realised that it had nothing to do with her when she heard Mrs. J cry out her son's name and knew instantly that something had happened to the Rupert in the photographs; she thought for a second or two that he'd been killed, but helping Mrs. J pack a case as they waited for the gestapo to arrive to drive her to Birmingham she found herself telling his mother that he'd most likely be fine, that although they'd said his injuries were life-threatening he was in a great hospital for battlefield injuries. That the QE was famous for being fantastic, so that she'd ended up having to tell her, although she knew it was a very dumb thing to do, that she knew all about it because once upon a time she used to be an army medic. She felt incredibly sorry for Mrs. J, not only because of what was facing her in Birmingham, despite what she'd said to her about it Molly knew how much danger her son was in, but because of who she was going to be forced to spend hours with. The person she felt most sorry for was poor Mr. J who was just as devastated as his wife, but whose injuries meant that he couldn't travel with her to mount any sort of vigil for their son, so that he was forced to stay behind in Bath with her and wait for phone calls.

Almost a month of going backwards and forwards to Birmingham with Rebecca for company had taken a very heavy toll on Mrs. J so that the news that he had recovered sufficiently to be transferred to University Hospital in Bath came as a massive relief, especially as she had to attend the Outpatients Department there to have her plasters removed and to go for physiotherapy, which would have been very difficult, if not impossible, if she was still going backwards and forwards to the QE. It also meant that Mr. J could take his turn in visiting their son, albeit with some help with his wheelchair, and it meant that Mrs. J didn't have to watch the ex-daughter-in-law do her best to become the current one again, or so she kept complaining to Mr. J.

-OG-

Their new routine of Molly waiting for Mr. J every afternoon while he was in the ward visiting his son was more than two weeks old when Molly began to wonder what the fuck was going on. Every day Mr. J would pin a bright smile on his face and take a deep breath as she wheeled him in to where his son was propped up in the bed by the window, the curtains round him tightly closed shutting him off from the rest of the three bedded room. A nurse would wheel Mr. J out again to where Molly was waiting, sometimes after an hour or so or sometimes after barely five minutes, and he would have a deeply anxious frown on his face, which he covered with a smile the minute he saw her. Without being aware of what was happening and against her better judgement she'd allowed herself to get very fond of both Mr. and Mrs. J, so she got more and more worried about what was going on when day after day she saw Mrs. J come home from her evening visits with the same sort of anxious expression on her face.

After a few days of taking Mr. J right through the closed curtains and up to the bed, and hearing Mr. J introduce her as Maggie, their little angel and hearing him tell Charles how much they relied on her and how they wouldn't know what they'd do without her, her terribly guilty conscience made her decide to visit him on her own. She still had no intentions of sticking around, as soon as he was out of hospital she was out of there, but she wanted to tell him how much he was upsetting his parents by behaving the way he was and that everyone understood how difficult and depressing this was for him, how they knew that he was very worried about his future, but there was no need for him to be quite so bleeding obnoxious, something that she also knew was none of her business. She didn't tell his parents she was going to visit him, she'd always maintained that she wouldn't sit down by his bed because hospital wards full of sick people gave her the willies, in fact she was scared that any minute some military pal of his was going to show up, someone who, unlikely as it was, might recognise her.

His bed was empty when she arrived, the covers thrown back and the sheets all rumpled, so that she stood stock still in the middle of the ward and experienced a stomach lurch of fear that something had gone wrong, but one of the regular nurses recognised her, saw her face and reassured her that he was with the physiotherapists working on his leg.

"How is he today?"

"It's tough for him, lying here day after day, not being able to get up and with all his worries about the future, and he's lost his appetite, so he's not eating"

"What you mean is that he's being an arse"

"No, he's just a bit depressed sometimes"

He barely greeted her, just nodded in her direction when he was wheeled back into the ward and helped into bed, the nurse closing his curtains as he stared straight ahead without speaking to her.

"How are you today?" Molly found herself pinning the "visiting Charles" bright smile on her face as she tried to instigate the conversation she wanted to have, knowing that she had no right to be there, that it was all none of her business and that he could call for a nurse or security any second and have her thrown out.

"Shit"

She actually thought that 'shit' was probably a fair enough response in the circumstances, but his answer made her even more aware that he wasn't making any effort to pull himself out of the low state he'd got into, or if he was it wasn't working and she knew how vital it was to his recovery as well as to his parents that he made some attempt to do just that.

"Look, I know that it's none of my business but you are getting much better and you'd get better still if you'd eat and you really need to ….."

"I need to do what exactly? I don't know if you've noticed but I can't really do an awful lot at the moment, and you know what Maggie? I'm not going to be able to do a whole lot more when I get out of here either, I'll be on the fucking scrap heap, the army doesn't want anyone whose stomach and legs are fucked" His posh voice was scathing as he looked at her for the first time since the nurse had helped him back into bed "Just go, you're quite right, this has got nothing whatsoever to do with you, just leave me alone"

"I'm sorry, I was only trying to help, your parents are trying to help, everyone is trying to help you feel better, but never mind, I'm going"

"No, trust me, people keep telling me that I'm doing well, that I'm recovering, because they're trying to make themselves feel better"

That was the point at which she saw red and completely lost her temper.

"How do you work that one out? My god, you're such a knob, and an ungrateful one at that" she took a deep breath and told herself not to shout "You should be dead, you were dead a couple of times, and then all these people, these people what are trying to make themselves feel better, the medics, the bloody surgeons and all the rest of them that have all worked their knackers off saving your sorry arse, alright maybe not so much here but at Bastion and the QE definitely, and your poor bloody parents what have been through hell, especially your dad who can't even get on and off the shitter without help, and who couldn't travel to Birmingham when you were scaring the crap out of everyone by trying to drop dead on them, and now you're back down here he has to rely on me to help him come in here every day so that you can be a bleeding miserable sod and refuse to talk to him" She took another much needed deep breath before she continued "He knows you're fragged, everyone knows you're bleeding fragged, but he's never complained, not once, nor your poor mum who went up and down that bleeding motorway all the time and she couldn't even pull her own knickers up, she had to rely on that horrible cow you was married to, and your mum's never moaned once neither" Molly suddenly realised that she was saying a whole lot of indefensible things that were none of her business to someone who was laying badly hurt in a hospital bed, someone who'd been through a nightmare and who couldn't just get up and leave "And I'm sorry and I'm gonna go now before you call someone and have me thrown out"

She didn't look at his face as she flounced out, leaving the curtain wide open in a final act of ill- tempered mutiny and tried not to see the other two patients staring at her as she realised that she hadn't exactly been keeping her voice down, that she'd been yelling at him, and that she was going to have to go back at some point and say that she was sorry, that it wasn't now, it never had been and it never would be, any of her business.

-OG-


	2. Chapter 2

**Author's notes: Thank you for your support, I hope you enjoy this.**

 **Getting To Know You**

"Hi, how you doing today?"

She had taken a deep breath and pasted a big, bright 'visiting Charles' smile on her face which she found was a complete waste of time as he was staring out of the window on the other side of his bed and hadn't even glanced her way as she'd pushed through the curtains and now stood, uncertain as to whether she should just go or whether to say what she'd come here to say first and then go.

Shit, she couldn't believe how hard this was as she took another deep breath "I'm sorry about all that bollocks yesterday, you know, sorry about throwing a fit 'n that, it really weren't none of my business"

He turned and looked at her straight-faced without a hint of a smile in his dark chocolate brown eyes and she thought just how bloody attractive he was, a fact that had somehow got forgotten or anyway had escaped her notice when she'd been haranguing him the day before. She'd always known from his photographs that he was extremely good looking, but it was far more apparent when you saw him face to face, even when he was ultra-pale and weary looking with the dark circles of illness under his eyes, dark circles which made her feel even more guilty.

"Yep, so you bloody should be" He bit his bottom lip, letting a small smile play round his mouth for all the world as if he was trying not to laugh at her "I think your bedside manner is shite and the volume could have been turned down a bit" he gave up pretending to be annoyed and grinned at her, which lit up his face "But you were right, I am going to make it out of here on my own two feet, both of them, and for that I should be bloody grateful, and Mum and Dad have been brilliant, putting up with all my bollocks without telling me to pull myself together when I've been such a miserable tit, you were right about that as well. I feel like a bloody jelly and I've never felt like a bloody jelly before in my life, and you probably said exactly what I needed to hear, even if I didn't enjoy it very much, but now you tell me something, Maggie" He'd started to laugh "Is your hair really that bloody awful colour?"

"It is at the moment"

-OG-

She visited him every day with his dad as he slowly improved and even sat by his bed for some of the time, although neither of them said a word about the two visits she'd made on her own. She celebrated with his parents' when he was allowed to shower and to use the lavatory, and again when he was allowed to walk to the ward doors and back, until the red letter day arrived when he was told that he was going to be discharged home in a couple of days and she started panicking about not having made any plans of where to move on to, it still felt too dangerous to stay. Okay, so he didn't know there was a bit of a problem and his parents now felt like her own family, but Mrs. J was well on the way to being fully recovered and Mr. J was going to have the plasters off his legs in a week or so and would then start to be much more mobile, so it was definitely time to go. She told herself she would make plans as soon as Mr. J was up and out of the wheelchair so that he wouldn't need any help at all anymore, and when she'd seen for herself that Charles could manage the stairs with his crutches and wearing the support boot and that she would definitely go as soon as she was sure.

-OG-

"You're different to what I expected you know, you being a Rupert 'n that"

"How long is it since you left? Since you stopped being in?" Molly shrugged, not wanting to talk about her time in the army "I knew you'd been in when you were giving me hell in hospital, some of the things you said, the words you used" He paused "and then Mum said you used to be a medic, so what the bloody hell are you doing here, Maggie? You're far too young to retire and you don't seem to be injured or ill or anything so why are you here babysitting the James family? Shit, they didn't throw you out or anything did they?"

"No, you cheeky bugger they didn't throw me out, I found it wasn't for me, I don't like sick people or hospitals" She lied, she'd known that telling Mrs. J that she'd been a medic would come back and bite her on the bum "And I'm a lot older than I look"

"You only look about 12 so that wouldn't be hard, would it? Well, apart from the hair" he laughed "How old are you?"

Molly considered lying for a moment before telling him the truth, that she was just 24, and had been out of the army for some months, and then changed the subject by asking him whether he missed army life and what it was like serving in Afghanistan, not telling him that she had served there herself, and that it was partly because of what had happened out there that she was in his parents' house in Bath being a sort of glorified home help and calling herself Maggie.

"I miss it, the army was my whole life, well apart from Sam and my parents of course" Molly noticed that he didn't mention the Nazi gestapo officer "I used to want to be deployed, volunteered, loved it, felt free as soon as I got on the tarmac at Brize, oh, fuck it, the truth was that I loved getting away from home, away from Rebecca, and I'm not proud of saying that, and I couldn't bear it if Sam thought for one minute that it meant that I loved being away from him, because I didn't, I love him, but being away from her, living out of a bergen was like stepping into a different world, one where what I wanted mattered, where I mattered"

"Your mum says she wants you back"

"No bloody chance, I came to my senses once, I am not going to make the same mistake again" He snorted the words out, then thought for a moment "Afghan was dusty, bloody filthy dirty, very hot and boring a lot of the time, sometimes it was dangerous, sometimes bloody terrifying, and sometimes it was a lot of fun and Oh God, I'm going to miss all that"

Even as she silently agreed with him about what it felt like knowing that you were never again going to be deployed somewhere like Afghanistan, Molly asked him whether he would stay in if he was restricted to a desk job and he shook his head, the expression on his face making him look for a moment as though he was fighting his emotions. He had been out of hospital for nearly three weeks and was not only working like someone possessed to try and get his fitness levels back but kept on saying that he wasn't looking forward to his rehab time at Headley Court because he was worried about spending time with others who might be depressed about being on the scrapheap. Molly wanted desperately to tell him how wrong he was but couldn't say anything to reassure him that Headley wasn't like that without telling him stuff she didn't want to share.

His father was out of plaster and was also working very hard with his physiotherapists to get back his full mobility, which was going to take some time, and Molly knew that she should be working equally hard on making plans to get out of there; she kept promising herself she would start the next day, or maybe the day after that. The more time she spent laughing and having long conversations with Charles, the closer their friendship was getting, a friendship that she couldn't afford.

They were sitting on the garden bench where she was recovering from a strenuous and inelegant game of garden badminton with Sam, a game that Charles had sat and watched while yelling encouragement at Sam, and apparently keeping the score, although she wasn't sure how accurately he was doing that, as he rested his leg from the circuits he'd been making round and round the garden. The badminton had come to an end when Mrs. J had called Sam in because his mother had arrived to collect him leaving the two of them sitting on the bench together, neither of them had any wish to go in and see Rebecca.

"So tell me about you, Maggie"

"There's nothing much to say, I come from the east end, in case you couldn't tell " She giggled "I was in for a bit but then I found that I hated hospitals so here I am" She started saying a silent prayer begging him not to ask her anything else, not to ask her any more about her time in the army, not to ask her where she'd served or when, a silent prayer that appeared to be answered when Mrs. J called him in to say goodbye to Rebecca and Sam who were just leaving. She got up and trailed into the house after him, looking to escape to her room or to help Mrs. J get the dinner on, or anything really to avoid being alone with him until he forgot all about doing her nut in by asking her questions she didn't want to answer.

-OG-

"See you later" Mrs. J shouted upstairs to Molly and she heard the front door slam leaving the house blessedly silent and empty so that she could go into the study and "borrow" Mr. J's laptop to go on-line and check out her options for seasonal work and rooms to let. The James family had taken Sam out for the day, and although they had tried repeatedly to persuade her to go with them she'd kept saying no, eventually lying and saying that long drives made her car sick. She wanted to be on her own so that she could use his laptop without having to explain why and what she was doing and it was also more than a week since she'd last called Belinda. Although no-one knew where she was exactly, Molly had decided it was safer like that, and she'd changed to a pay-as-you-go mobile, dumping her old one as soon as she'd arrived in Bath, she still made sure that she checked in at least once a week, not only to make sure that everyone was okay, but also to see whether there was any news, any developments about her.

A short conversation with her mother reassured her that there was nothing new, that no-one had been round looking for her, and then half an hour on-line made it pretty obvious that she would have to go in person to check things out and that Weston Super Mare was by far her best bet, it was easy to get to from Bath so it wouldn't take her all day on the train, was big enough to have lots of opportunities for "off the books" holiday jobs and would probably have cheap rooms to rent, although she would need a local paper for that. As it was nearly midday, it was a bit late to go immediately, and she hadn't warned them that she might be out when they got back, so she would think up some plausible excuse and then go off for the day during the week. The relief she felt at making a start on some sort of plan, and the even bigger sense of relief that she didn't actually have to do anything for a few days made her feel like she could breathe out, and the fact that it was a gloriously hot and sunny day and she was alone in the house, made her relax and decide to sunbathe on the lawn. Milk bottle white skin wasn't the best if she didn't want to look out of place flogging seaside crap on the front in Weston.

-OG-

She was laying on her stomach her head resting on her arms on a tatty travel rug which lived in the 'odds and sods' cupboard in the corner of the kitchen and which smelt really dusty and musty. She had given up trying to concentrate on reading her book and was drifting somewhere between sleeping and waking when he very nearly gave her a heart attack.

"Mind you don't burn, redhead like you" He was wearing jeans and a 'T' shirt, and was blocking out the sun as he stood over her with his legs wide apart, holding a cup of coffee which he was sipping from as he smirked, obviously enjoying his own joke.

"Shit, what the fuck are you doing here? You nearly gave me a Julius Caesar" Molly went to scramble up before she remembered just in time that she was only wearing her knickers, she'd thought she was alone in the house so her bra was draped over the back of a kitchen chair that she'd walked past on her way out into the garden, along with her 'T' shirt and cut offs, so she was at a decided disadvantage. Apart from that, there was the fact that she couldn't remember, and couldn't check without sitting up and displaying her all, what knickers she was wearing, she had a horrible suspicion that it was one of her saggy elastic, gone grey in the wash pairs, or even one of the pairs that barely covered the essentials.

"I live here" She couldn't see his face, the sun was behind him, but she could hear the laugh in his voice as he watched her obvious discomfort.

"But you've taken Sam out for the day"

"No, my parents have taken Sam out for the day, I was still tired so Mum left me to have a bit of a lie-in, then when I woke up I looked out of my bedroom window and I saw something _really_ interesting in the garden" He was now openly laughing "so I thought I'd come down and check it out"

He ran his hand through his hair as she rested her chin on her folded hands and watched him and tried not to notice the way his hair that was slightly longer now than the regulation army length was curling round his fingers, or notice his brown eyes, or the way his bicep curled against the fabric of his white 'T' shirt when he bent his arm. He pulled the shirt over his head and threw it at her, laughing, "Here" then turned his back, ever the gentleman, sparing her blushes as this time she did scramble up and pull his 'T' shirt over her head, loving the soft feel of it as it completely swamped her. It smelt of fabric conditioner and was still warm from his body, the feeling of which she loved, almost as much as she loved the sight of his taut back muscles. It was obvious that all the frantic exercising was beginning to pay off not only on his back, but on his backside which she couldn't help noticing as he stood there right in front of her, naked from the hips up and with bare feet. She was thoroughly embarrassed when he turned his head slightly to see if she was ready and caught her checking him out and even though he laughed, she desperately hoped that he hadn't noticed the blush that was creeping up her neck. She hated that he'd caught her perving on him, but at least when she'd checked she was wearing almost decent full-coverage knickers.

"Budge up" She shuffled along the rug to make room as he sat down next to her, far too close for her comfort and smiled at her as he did so. His brown eyes were crinkling at the edges and his white teeth were gleaming, and she told herself that the sudden overwhelming urge she had to knock him on his back and snog the living daylights out of him were all to do with the fact that she was out in the garden, sitting on a rug very, very close to a very fit bloke in her knickers with no bra and his 'T' shirt and that she hadn't been anywhere near a bloke for a very long time and that she needed to go in the house and get dressed immediately.

"Won't be long" She all but ran into the kitchen, hoping that there wasn't any cellulite wobbling on the backs of her thighs, as she decided not to bother with her bra but pulled on her cut offs, instantly feeling far more in control. Wearing something made her feel that she could march back out and sit on the rug next to him and hold a sensible conversation. But it was one thing seeing your employers' son sitting in his own garden and telling yourself that he was sitting there ready to have a chat, but it proved to be another one entirely for her to actually go outside and sit next to him as he stretched out on a travel rug on the lawn. He was half naked and wearing low slung jeans that clung to his hip bones showing a glimpse of the soft dusting of hairs that lead down from his navel, together with the muscles of his chest, not body builder bulgy type muscles, just very well-defined ones, and they were being shown off by the fact that she was wearing his 'T' shirt and not him.

She couldn't stay there and go and sit down next to him in the garden, it all felt too weird, and anyway she was scared what questions he might ask now that they were on their own in the house, she had to escape and needed to find some reason to go back indoors before this situation got impossible. Wanting to go to bed with him was a very unlooked for complication, and she really needed to get her shit together and get out of there, escape from Royal Crescent had just become an exceedingly high priority.

-OG-


	3. Chapter 3

**Author's Notes: Had no idea until late this morning whether Chap. 2 had made it onto the website or was lost in cyber space, but apparently it now looks okay. I am sure that if anyone didn't get it they'll let me know and I'll re up-date. Parts of Chap.2 were written so that I could have a little wallow as I drew myself a mental picture of what he looks like in his jeans and without his shirt, it was obviously a bit of self-indulgence on my part, as are parts of Chap. 3.**

 **Hope you enjoy it.**

 **Moving On**

"Wondered where you'd got to" He was leaning against the doorframe in the kitchen watching her at the sink.

"I thought I'd do the vegetables for dinner, you know, get things organised for your mum" She knew that it was a totally pathetic excuse and that he was now openly laughing at her again, she had this horrible suspicion that he knew exactly what effect he was having on her and was enjoying himself, as he picked up his 'T' shirt from where she'd folded it onto the back of the chair and put it on, she'd changed into her own clothes when she'd turned tail and come back into the kitchen.

"Maggie, it's not even one o'clock yet, it won't be dinnertime for hours"

She kept her back to him as she frantically scraped new potatoes and wished that he would stop laughing at her and go, that he would push off and go out and exercise his bloody leg or something, the same as he did every other day, because if he started asking her questions again she was definitely going to need some sort of magic trick to get out of answering this time, or a miracle, and where was Jesus with one of his miracles when you needed him?

Why couldn't he just leave her alone because suddenly she felt this huge temptation to tell him the truth, that she was tired of all the lies and the hiding and the pretending that she was okay all the time, she wanted to tell him that when she'd decided to dye her hair sort of auburn, she hadn't meant it to end up this bright sort of scarlet which he'd said in the hospital was _horrible_ , and that she thought it was horrible too, she hated it, but that she'd dyed it for a reason. She'd meant for it to be part of her sort of disguise, that she wasn't even using her real name for the same reason and that she was deceiving him, deceiving everyone here all the time, but she couldn't say any of it. It was definitely time to move on.

-OG-

Trudging around Weston-Super-Mare was complete shite as far as Molly was concerned, she hadn't expected it to be lots of fun, but even so she hadn't expected it to be quite as horrible as it turned out to be. The weather was lovely, the sun was shining and was making the sea all sparkly and it was very warm, and the place was full of sunburnt, happy looking holidaymakers, with loads of kids running up and down the promenade eating ice creams, but it was totally the pits going up to sleazy, shady looking blokes on the sea front to ask them whether there was any chance of some cash-in-hand work. She'd lost count of the number of times her question was misinterpreted, but it was on a regular basis, and the most depressing thing about that was that she didn't get a single offer to get her kit off, which she supposed she should be grateful for. Eventually she gave up and went and sat in a grubby side street café and did some calculations of how much money exactly she'd managed to scrape together during her time with the James family together with what she'd had saved up and the remnants of her deployment money, and now that she'd checked in the local papers, how much she would actually need to be able to rent a bed sitter somewhere and for how long she would be able to fund it if she couldn't find a job.

She had managed to avoid having to answer any of his questions by simply making sure that she wasn't ever in the same place on her own with him, that she was constantly busy doing something, doing anything, and that as soon as he walked into a room, she walked out, but she couldn't keep that up for ever, sooner or later she wouldn't be able to avoid the truth getting out.

She got out her phone and made a couple of arrangements to view rooms which from the descriptions in the paper didn't sound too shitty and then asked the man behind the counter for directions. She tried hard to ignore his appalled expression as she gave him the addresses and went to see where she might potentially be living for a few months. She didn't hold out much hope that they would be up to the standard that she had got used to recently, being like Royal Crescent was probably asking a bit too much, but she was used to army accommodation, so she would be able to tolerate most things.

Both of the first two rooms that she looked at made her heart sink, they made her parent's maisonette in east Ham look like the height of luxury. The worst thing about both of them wasn't the nylon sheets or the thin curtains or the stained carpets or the decidedly dodgy streets they were located in, or even the damp 'seasidey' smell that reminded her of drains; it was the need to share bathrooms with other tenants, bathrooms which were totally horrible by anyone's standards. Even though the bed sitters themselves were just about bearable, the bathrooms were not, you would have to clean the bath before you got in it to have a bath, not after you got out, and you'd have to take a deep breath and hold your nose before you even went in to use the lavatory.

It would probably be a good plan to at least check out some of the other places advertising in the local paper, but she was now far too disheartened and knew that she would have to be absolutely desperate to live in any of them, and that she needed to have a drastic re-think about what to do and where to go next.

Going home to Bath on the train felt like just that, going home, which was a feeling she needed to get rid of as soon as possible, Bath wasn't her home, Royal Crescent wasn't her home, they weren't her family, and they most likely wouldn't want anything more to do with her if they knew about her, knew about the lies she'd told and the ones she kept on telling and about what had gone on.

-OG-

He was sitting on the bottom of the stairs chatting on his phone when she let herself in. As soon as he caught sight of her his face broke into the same lazy grin that he'd had the other morning in the garden as he beckoned her over and patted the stair, inviting her to come and sit next to him. She knew she shouldn't, that it would be asking for all sorts of trouble as she went and did it anyway and fought the urge to put her head on his shoulder and let him wipe away the memories of those depressing bed-sitters and the shudderingly awful bathrooms.

He immediately put his arm round her shoulders which increased her feelings of being churned up and full of indecision, she wanted so much to lean into him and at the same time she wanted to run away as fast as she could and to put as much distance between them as possible. He finished his call and turned to face her, a soft smile playing around his mouth as he caught his bottom lip between his teeth and put his hand up and tucked a lock of her hair behind her ear and Molly shook herself, then shook his arm off her shoulders and got up, ready to march off up the stairs, away from the terrible temptation that was sitting there right in front of her, smiling at her.

"Give me a hand up" he put his hand up towards her as he struggled to get on his feet without putting too much weight on his injured leg, then tightened his grip on her wrist as she helped him up, pulling her in towards him, his face wreathed in a smile as if he was laughing at her the whole time, so she took a deep breath and looked up at him. He hadn't shaved, so he had pronounced stubble and she could smell the fresh soapiness of his skin and the slightly lemony tang of his shampoo even though she was trying very hard not to.

"Have you stopped avoiding me yet?"

"I'm not avoiding you, why would I do that?"

"I don't know, you tell me"

Then he kissed her, just leaned forward and gave her a short, soft and very gentle kiss so that she pulled away sharply and stared up at him, lost for words. He didn't say anything, didn't apologise, didn't ask her if it was okay, ask her if he could, he just immediately leaned in and kissed her again and this time she didn't pull away or make any attempt to stop him, just reached up and put her hands in the curls at the back of his neck and pulled his head down towards her as the soft and gentle kisses quickly became something more as her body responded to him. She tried to tell herself that this was absolutely mental, that it was totally nuts, and that she should put a stop to it straight away, at least before it got way out of hand, but she didn't because she didn't want to, instead she stood up on tiptoe to make it easier to reach him as she kissed him back.

His limp was barely noticeable so that she'd almost forgotten about his injuries as they climbed the stairs until he leaned back against his bedroom door, pushing it shut with his back and taking the support boot off, then nudged her gently backwards until the backs of her legs were against his bed and she had no choice but to lay down, while all the time he kept on kissing her so that neither of them had said a word since he'd asked her why she was avoiding him. He let his warm weight settle on top of her, then propped himself up on one elbow and looked at her with heavy dark eyes as she struggled to retain some sort of control over what she was doing. She gave up when he started to slide her 'T' shirt over her head laughing as he said he'd been wanting to do that ever since she'd been wearing his shirt in the garden, and that she had driven him mad sitting there only wearing his shirt and her knickers. He removed her bra, laughing again as he said that she was completely overdressed so that she ended up helping him remove the rest of her clothes, and then heard him whisper that she was beautiful as she lay naked with her stuff in a heap on the floor. She slid her hands up inside his shirt, then tugged it off over his head and ran her hands over the muscles she'd been admiring when they were in the garden, the muscles that she'd thought about over and over again in the last few days, then moved her small hands down and started to fumble as she tried to undo the buckle of the leather belt that was holding up his jeans so that he pushed her hands away and undid it himself.

-OG-

"You going to tell me what's going on, gorgeous?" He'd stroked her hair back from her face then lifted a strand and pretended to look at it closely and laughed before punctuating every word with a light kiss on her face, lifting his head and smiling into her eyes as he stroked her lips with his thumb, lips which were still red and swollen from being so thoroughly kissed "I think we've already established that you're not a natural redhead"

"Shut up" she giggled, knowing that she probably had some very soppy and satisfied expression on her face, it had been such a long time, if ever, since she'd felt anything like the way she did at that moment "There's nothing to tell" she lied.

"Are you going to come and visit me at Headley?"

"I can't, I can't drive"

"You could get a lift with mum, I expect she'll visit and she'd probably enjoy the company, I know I would" She didn't answer so he tightened his arm round her as she lay with her head tucked under his chin, her body curled into his side, and then angled his head away so that he could look at her face "Are you still going to be here when I get back, Maggie?"

"Why wouldn't I be?"

"I don't know, perhaps because you've been looking for a job and somewhere to live in Weston and before you start don't bother to deny it, because I'm pretty sure it's not my dad or my mum who looked on-line, so that leaves just one person ….. and that's you. I presume that's where you were today, so did you have any luck?"

"It was just an idea, I mean I can't stop here forever now that your parents don't need me help anymore, and no, as it happens everything I saw today was complete shite, so yes I'll be here when you get back, that is, unless your mum and dad throw me out before then, they're most likely gonna want to do that if they find out about this" She tried to smile at him as she lied because she didn't have a clue what to say, not only had she'd royally screwed up by leaving a browsing history on his dad's laptop, and that was because she'd totally forgotten about erasing the evidence, but she couldn't possibly visit him at Headley Court, it had been her last posting before everything had gone to shit, so there was bound to still be people there who knew her. On top of that she'd just enjoyed the most incredible sex with him and he didn't know who she was, what her real name was, he believed that she was Maggie.

"Of course they're not going to throw you out, especially not because of this; I wouldn't let them for a start"

-OG-

"Bye, take care and do as the teacher tells you" She laughed and tried to joke as she gave him a decorous kiss on the cheek, there was, in Molly's opinion, far too big an audience for anything else. Sam, Rebecca, his dad and his mum who was acting as his chauffeur and driving him up there, but in return he gave her one of his most wicked grins then cupped her face, and kissed her soundly on the lips, totally ignoring the sharp intake of breath from the spectators, followed by a prolonged tight hug. Molly was horribly aware that he'd most likely done it to give an unmistakeable message to his ex-wife, to thoroughly piss her off, but he had managed to put on a show for his mum and dad at the same time.

"Stop it, you're being a knob" She whispered as quietly as she could in the ear farthest away from the group of people who were watching them with expressions of utter astonishment on their faces.

"Yeah, I know, sorry" he whispered back and snorted a laugh down his nose, then released his hold slightly and continued at a more normal volume "I'll be good, I promise, come up and see me, you know, if you can"

"Yeah, okay, but you know I get car sick" she lied. In a lot of ways she wished he'd just go before he said or did anything else she was going to find very difficult to explain to his parents. Even though she wanted him to go, she knew she was going to miss him dreadfully, and not only because they'd slept together the night before. She had ended up spending the whole night with him, he had laughed and asked whether his mum was in the habit of tucking her in at night when she'd said she better go in case his mum noticed that she wasn't in her own bed. Molly had insisted that they should really talk about _this,_ whatever _this_ was, before they advertised any of it to anyone else, even his parents. He'd just laughed and said it was whatever she wanted it to be and added that his mum wouldn't come in and find them together because she hadn't tucked him in at night since he was eight and that had been before he went off to boarding school.

In the cold light of day they hadn't made any progress in talking to each other about what had happened between them. They'd had very little sleep and had, in fact, only just dropped off when the dawn chorus started so that they'd woken up late and she'd had a massive scramble to get up and out of his bed before the rest of the household was up and about and before his mum bought him in a cup of coffee. As soon as she'd got back to her own room she'd looked in the mirror and tried to wipe away her panda eyes as well as doing her best to ignore the ache in her thighs while she'd slapped loads of moisturiser onto her face and wished that having sex with someone with stubble didn't have to mean that you looked as though you'd been gone over with a brillo pad, because she'd lost at least five layers of skin. A few hours of sea breezes and a lot of sex hadn't done much for her hair either, it was a complete tangle of curls which would need at least a litre of conditioner before she'd be able to even get a brush through it.

Despite all that and the fact that she looked tired and heavy eyed as though she hadn't had enough sleep, which she hadn't, she thought that anyone looking at her would be able to see how incredibly happy she looked. The trouble was that it wouldn't take a lot for her to get very upset, not only because he was going away and she didn't want him to, but because she wanted to stay _with_ him, she wanted _this_ to mean something and it couldn't.


	4. Chapter 4

**Author's notes:** **Thank you for your reviews, I know that some of you are getting mad at her because she won't say what's going on, what's happened, but she will come clean ….. eventually.**

 **Going To Shit**

"Promise?"

He wasn't asking her to promise that she would go to Headley Court and visit him, what he was asking her to promise was that she would still be there when he got back, so she nodded and smiled, not sure whether she was lying or not, but she couldn't bring herself to maybe lie to him out loud. She knew she had to make some sort of plan before he came home, either to go or to tell him everything and she couldn't imagine being able to scrape up enough courage to do that.

-OG-

"Why did you tell my daddy to do as the teacher told him? I thought he was going to hospital again, you don't have teachers telling you what to do if you're in hospital do you?"

"No, it was just a joke, mate, I was just teasing Daddy, that's all"

They were sitting on the garden bench and Sam was swinging his legs backwards and forwards deliberately kicking the leg of the bench and getting on Molly's nerves, which were pretty frayed anyway, she had put her hand on his leg to stop him twice already, but he kept starting again, obviously upset and angry at Charles' departure.

"Do you like my daddy?"

"Of course I do"

"My mummy says that he fancies you and that you fancy him"

"Does she?" Molly was at a loss to know what to say to the little boy who was seven going on fifteen at that moment, she wouldn't have thought it was the right thing for a kid of his age unless you wanted him to come out with something really embarrassing somewhere, like in front of his grandparents.

"What does fancy mean Maggie?"

"It just means that you like someone a lot, it's sort of a grown up sort of thing, don't worry about it mate"

She wanted to giggle, she supposed she should be grateful that the Nazi hadn't gone into a full explanation to him, but she wished Charles was there at that moment because she wanted to slap him, almost as much as she wanted to kiss him, she had no idea what the hell he'd been thinking of putting on that little display in front of bloody Rebecca, they weren't even actually together or at least it had only been less than twenty four hours, so where the fuck had all that come from?

-OG-

Stripping the sheets and pillowcases off his bed so that whoever changed it, probably his mum, wouldn't find the evidence of their night together in the form of her eye make-up all over his pillowcase or worse, she felt like they'd had a very lucky escape when she'd found a stray foil wrapper from a condom in the tangled bedding. She put it in her pocket and then resisted the temptation to put his pillow against her face and breathe in the lingering smell of him and his shampoo before she changed the pillowcase. It would be at least ten days before she saw him again and that was always supposing she stayed and whether she stayed or not it was still going to be a very long ten days. As she put a fresh sheet on the bed she couldn't help trying to work out where he and his mum would be at that moment and hoped that he didn't feel obliged to say anything to her, to give his mother any sort of explanation of why he'd decided to kiss her like that in front of all of them.

-OG-

"Is there something the matter?"

"No, why would there be?"

Molly watched him walk out of the room and close the door behind him again very much as he'd been doing ever since he'd arrived home for the weekend from Headley. She had been counting the hours until he walked through the front door, wanting nothing more than to see his face break into that "I am so pleased to see you" smirk, instead of which he'd looked as stern and forbidding and downright angry as he had when he'd been at his worst in hospital. She'd stayed on at Royal Crescent because she'd wanted to see him and knowing that he had to go back after the weekend for another two weeks of rehab, left her plenty of time to sort something out, and anyway she hadn't found a job or anywhere to live yet, although to be fair, she hadn't actually looked. She knew that it was probably stupid to keep putting things off, but she was finding it so hard to just pack up and go when she wanted to be with him, when she'd missed him so much when he wasn't there. He might have been behaving like a complete knob when he left and she had no idea what he thought or felt about her, and they might not have spoken since he'd gone into Headley, he hadn't called her and she couldn't think what she would say if she called him, but even in her worst nightmares she hadn't expected this and now she wished more than anything that she'd listened to the little voice in her head that had told her to leave.

It was blatantly obvious that he now regretted what had happened between them before he went, that the time they'd spent apart which had seemed like a lifetime to her but which had strengthened the way she felt in an 'absence makes the heart grow fonder so that I can't wait to rip his clothes off' sort of way, had had completely the opposite effect on him. She wasn't even sure now that it had been his heart that had been involved in the first place, it was looking increasingly likely that it had been some other much more basic part of his anatomy, and that he was now the one who was avoiding being alone with her.

"Are you gonna tell me what's the matter, what I've done, why you're being like this?"

"Being like what? I don't know what you're talking about" He shrugged.

"Yes, you bloody do and I'm …. um, …. I'm sort of fond of you Charles, I didn't know that we'd fallen out"

He stood and stared at her, arms folded across his chest, and not a hint of a smile on his face, obviously weighing up whether to explain what was bugging the hell out of him or to slam out again so that she was just starting to get more than a bit mad with him, as she tried again.

"I thought you might have missed me too, but it don't look like it does it? It seems like I was wrong there"

He still didn't say anything, just stood with his arms folded across his chest and looked down at his feet, as Molly stared at him, unsure whether she wanted to cry or yell that if he'd changed his mind and didn't want any sort of relationship with her, didn't even want them to be friends, then he only had to say. It seemed to her that it was getting more and more obvious that that's what had happened here, but he only had to tell her that spending the night together had been a mistake and that he was sorry, there was absolutely no need for all this crap.

"You're fond of me? Hey, well, here's the thing, you see, I was thinking about you one afternoon during the week, you know, missing you and wondering what you were up to, wondering whether you were still at home or whether you were getting ready to piss off, and I decided to look you up. So I did, and then hey, guess what Maggie? I couldn't find any fucking trace anywhere of any Maggie Dawkins, or a Margaret Dawkins or even an M. Dawkins or a Dawkins of any sort who was a medic, nothing, anywhere, not now, and not in the last few years. So, I know I've asked you this before, but I'll ask you again now, what the fuck's going on?"

"Look, it's not what it looks like"

Shit, shit, shittin' shit, this was the last thing she'd expected. She'd known she had to tell him, she'd had every intention of doing exactly that, some time, eventually, but just not now, not like this when she hadn't even had a chance to get her story straight. 

"So, what is it like Maggie? Or whatever the fuck your name is"

"It's Molly"

"Nice name" He nodded, pursed his lips then smiled as if he was actually considering it "Tell me something, is it yours or is it just another one you've plucked out of thin air? And while we're at it, were you ever a medic, or in the army at all for that matter, or is all that just another bunch of shit?"

"Please don't be like this, I _am_ Molly, it is my real name, and I _am_ an army medic, or at least I was until a bit ago, I've never lied about any of that and there was nothing made up about you and me, that was all real, I promise, but I can't tell you what's gone on, I just can't"

"You've got a bloody nerve haven't you? Don't be like this? You've never lied? There was nothing made up? Only _who_ you are, and I can't help asking myself, why? Why would you need to lie about who you are or what your name is? Why would you need to hide? And don't say you're not hiding because you are, so why the fuck can't you tell me what's going on? I presume it has to be something illegal, shit, you're not fucking AWOL are you?"

"No, course not and I'm sorry, I didn't do nothing illegal, well not really, but there might be some people looking for me, I'm not sure any more ….."

"You know what, Molly? If that's your real name, it doesn't actually make any difference does it? You lied, you've lied to all the people I love, you lied to my parents, you lied to Sam, and you lied to me even when … well …. and now you won't tell me what the fuck is going on, so how the hell can you expect me to believe a single word that you say? So it really doesn't matter does it? Please just keep out of my way, I don't want to speak to you, I don't even want to see your face after this weekend, okay?"

He turned on his heel and walked out leaving her staring at the door he'd almost slammed as he'd left. She'd had plenty of one night stands before she'd joined the army, but had thought she'd put those days well behind her, and anyway she'd believed that this was different, that he was different. Snotty bastard had walked out without even giving her the chance to defend herself, alright he'd asked what was going on and she hadn't wanted to tell him, but he hadn't tried to change her mind, he'd just accepted what she'd said, not that she knew what the hell she could have said that would have made any difference, he was right, she had lied, she'd lied to them all.

A whole weekend of avoiding him and not catching his eye made Molly so angry with him that she was relieved when he finally set off with his mother after tea on Sunday. He'd avoided using her name at all and in fact he'd avoided saying a single word to her directly all weekend, so that his mum and dad had picked up on the shitty atmosphere between them and his father had given her a very sharp glance when he saw how upset she was that he'd left without saying goodbye to her. It upset her far more than it made her angry because they both knew that they would probably never see one another again. There had been some very puzzled looks exchanged between his parents and Molly hoped that he wouldn't give his mother his version of her sins on the way back to Headley, he didn't know anything about what had happened and what had made her do it, he hadn't let her explain and she was now left with no choice but to find somewhere to go and to move out in the next two weeks before he came home again.

-OG-

Another trudge around the back streets of Weston the day after he'd gone back to Headley Court had paid dividends in the end. She'd simply looked for any 'Help Wanted' notices stuck on shop windows and the odd cafe in the side streets of the more run down parts of the resort, and the second one she'd enquired about had borne the fruit of a waitressing job in a small one man greasy spoon café. There was very little actual waitressing, it was more standing on a sticky floor behind a chipped and scarred formica counter all day and smiling at people as she took orders for 'All Day Breakfasts' and everything with chips, bread and butter and dark brown tea, then wiping over the tables with a damp cloth in between, sweeping the floor at the end of the day and generally wiping round because the cleaner only came in once a week. The job wasn't bad, it made the balls of her feet ache to the point that they were burning, and the money was pretty crap but most of the regular customers were lovely and the tips helped, but the worst thing was the smell of rancid grease which she couldn't seem to get rid of out of her hair, no matter how often she washed it.

The best thing was that she found a room to rent three doors down from the café and over the bookies, a room that was still small, damp, smelly and barely furnished, and a room which had the added drawback of making her the one who lived nearest to the café which meant that she was expected to open up in the mornings and close up in the evenings, but the room did have access to a kitchenette and a bathroom which, although minimal in the comfort stakes, wasn't shared with anyone who thought that because you cleaned yourself in one it meant that bathrooms were self-cleaning. Once she'd cleaned it thoroughly, and tipped two bottles of bleach down the lavatory which looked disgusting because it was stained dark brown from the tea leaves that the staff from the bookies poured down it, it stayed clean.

A bit of her couldn't help wondering about them all, especially when the café was quiet and she hadn't got much to do, she hadn't told them she was leaving, she'd simply collected her stuff together and moved out when they were out for the day with Sam and it felt all wrong. She'd thought about writing them a note, had even started trying to compose one, but then couldn't think what the hell to say, so she'd scrapped the idea and told herself that she would wait till she was sorted and then ring them. She missed them dreadfully and felt incredibly guilty about the way she'd just vanished and hoped that they wouldn't worry about her, but she was also pretty sure that Charles would fill them in with his version of the facts once he got home and saw that she'd gone so that would stop them worrying and as no-one in Bath had her mobile number they couldn't call her.

She badly missed her access to Mr. J's lap-top, although Norman, known as Norm, who owned the café and did all the cooking, or more accurately waved a grease encrusted frying pan around, had a lap-top, Molly hadn't yet plucked up the courage to ask him if she could use it. Norm was very lazy, overweight and pasty faced and not only seemed to live on his own fried everything, the sort of diet her dad favoured given half a chance, but he never got his backside off his high stool in between cooking artery furring fry-ups for his customers. He was, however, very, very kind and had already given her two advances on her wages because she needed to buy a duvet and a cover, together with a couple of saucepans and a mug.

She was using her own name, she had no idea why she was doing that when Norm was paying her cash in hand with no questions asked, but Norm had said that he couldn't be arsed with all the tax bollocks, which most likely meant he wasn't paying any sort of tax himself. She was sick of pretending and was working on the principle that if they traced her, she'd face whatever had to be faced, and that she couldn't hide forever.

-OG-

Travelling home to Bath from Headley had made Charles want to scream at his mother to 'please shut the fuck up', she hadn't stopped wittering on about Molly or Maggie as she still kept calling her and how worried both she and his dad were about her because she'd just disappeared. He was totally aware that his mother kept looking at him, little sideways glances as she drove, she was so obviously waiting for him to say something, to provide some sort of explanation of what had been going on the last weekend he was home. The expression on her face was a human question mark, because she knew only too well that something had happened between him and Maggie, she wasn't blind so she knew that the two of them had got very close before he'd gone off to Headley. She didn't know whether they'd actually slept together, she didn't think it was any of her business, but much as Charles might think he had the ability to keep things to himself that he didn't want to share, his mother reckoned that she could always tell when he was trying to hide something.

He had been silently cursing for the first five minutes of their journey home, asking himself what the fuck she'd thought she was doing and why the fuck she'd taken so much notice of the things he'd said to her when he was upset and angry, she must have known that he didn't actually mean any of them, well maybe at the time he'd meant them and he still thought that he'd had every right to be furious with her, but she should have known that he would calm down and that then they could probably sort out whatever it was that needed sorting. Now she'd just moved out without telling anyone where she was going so that no-one knew where she'd moved to. He didn't even know her real surname, except that it wasn't Dawkins, or what had happened to start this whole bloody mess and he didn't even have the number of her mobile, so he couldn't call her and find out where she was and ask her to come home.


	5. Chapter 5

**Author's notes: I am glad so many of you are enjoying this and are intrigued about what she's done. We're almost at the point when she comes clean, but not quite!**

 **Charity Begins at Home**

He'd told his father that she'd lied to them about who she was, that her real name wasn't Maggie Dawkins but was Molly something or other and he'd wanted to admit that he'd behaved like a complete fuck-knuckle and had virtually accused her of doing it on purpose to hurt him, that they'd slept together and that he'd been really hurt when he'd found out that she'd lied to him when they were in bed. It had all seemed so reminiscent of his crappy relationship with Rebecca, the lies, the deceit and that he'd done the one thing he swore he'd never to do again and got himself emotionally involved. He'd lost his temper and then sulked which meant that she'd done exactly what he'd told her to do and buggered off and now he'd got absolutely no idea how to find her, or even where to start looking. He thought she was probably in Weston, but Weston was a big place and there were fucking shed-loads of people living there.

"Bloody hell"

Following his dad's suggestion of going through army records on the internet he had been looking for girls of about the right age, he couldn't be 100% sure that she hadn't lied to him about how old she was because she looked so much younger than 24, and he'd looked for girls who had been in the RAMC up until maybe the beginning of the year and who were called Molly. His research had paid off with surprising ease. He hadn't looked for Dawkins, he'd looked for M. Dawkins before and drawn a blank, so he'd known that that wasn't her real surname, but his dad had suggested that he looked for surnames that started with a 'D' and were maybe a bit similar, and it turned out that there was just one possibility, a CMT called Molly Dawes. She'd been discharged from Headley late last year, but he really couldn't believe that this was the same Molly, this couldn't be right, this one had been awarded the Military Cross for Bravery above and beyond in Afghanistan and the Molly he knew had said that she didn't know anything about serving in Afghan, he couldn't remember whether she'd said she hadn't been there but he'd assumed not because she'd asked him what it was like, or was that just another one of her lies? And she'd never mentioned that she'd been at Headley, even when they'd been speculating about what it was going to be like.

Trawling the newspaper archives looking for photographs of Military Awards Ceremonies had paid off with the same surprising ease; those sorts of awards to female soldiers were still rare enough to make all the nationals. There were photographs with every article, mainly because the girl standing outside Buckingham Palace holding up her medal in its display box for the photographers had the widest possible grin on her face and looked incredibly tiny and feminine in her dress uniform. A pretty girl who was a photographer's dream. It was also, without the smallest shadow of a doubt, Maggie, or Molly as he'd have to get used to calling her.

He'd checked all the papers and some of the articles had small inset photographs as well as the main one, the inset photographs showing her both in combats with her dark hair in some sort of braid and laughing for the camera, and one in civvies, long dark brown curls blowing in the wind, tiny and pretty with those unmistakeable green eyes and the same beautiful smile on her face. He didn't know whether to smile at the way she looked without the horrible dyed bright red hair, or at how happy she seemed to be in the photos or to get even more furious with her because she really was the most consummate liar he'd ever come across.

The articles detailed what she'd done to get her medal, how she'd risked her own life by crossing a minefield under fire to rescue a colleague who'd been shot and badly injured by a sniper, an action that the soldier in him thought was fucking awesome, and one which gave him a much better understanding of why she'd harangued him the way she had in hospital, but it wasn't the soldier in him that wanted to hug her and then give her hell for lying to him. Most of all, he wanted to ask her 'why?'

Being happy that he'd traced who she was turned out to be a very transient feeling, he might know her name and he might know a bit more about her, a very tiny little bit, but despite all the hours they'd spent talking and laughing and the night they'd spent together, he didn't feel like he knew her at all now and he was no closer to knowing where the hell she was. She was still missing.

-OG-

Loneliness was a bitch that Molly was learning to live with. This was the first time in her entire life that she'd been almost completely on her own, the first time that, apart from Norm and some of the customers, she didn't know a soul. Growing up in the noisy crowded chaos of her home in east Ham she used to crave the luxury of solitude, used to think that people who were only children or who were grown up enough or well off enough to live on their own were bleeding lucky. Five brothers and sisters, her parents, her grandmother, a host of mates, followed by a good long spell in the army, well, over four years anyway, had meant that she'd never had to rely on her own company for too long before. It wasn't only that she had no friends in Weston, that there was no-one to talk to or go out with and that she had no money to spare to go out anyway, or that her horrible little room totally lacked anything that made it a cosy or a comfortable place to be on her own, it didn't even have a tele and she didn't have access to a lap-top to get anything to watch, it was that she missed the James family and the life she'd found in Bath really badly, almost as much as she missed her life in the army.

For the first time since she'd jacked it in, she craved the friendships she'd had, the lads she'd served with even if she had sometimes felt like a primary school teacher taking her class for an outing. She wished so much that she hadn't got that sodding medal for saving that twat's life in Afghanistan because that had been the start of what had turned into her nightmare, even though the twat had become one of her best mates. Despite what had happened the last time she'd seen him, she would have contacted him when she'd left the army, but she couldn't because he'd upped and died on her.

It was a waste of time sitting there feeling sorry for herself, she knew that, but she couldn't help wishing more than anything that she'd told Charles the truth when he'd first asked her what was going on or that he'd stopped being angry with her long enough to let her try and explain why she'd lied to them all the way she had.

-OG-

 **Three months on.**

"Listen you prat, it's a posh do innit and I ain't got nothing to wear to something like that, have you?" Molly laughed at her friend Matt who was trying to persuade her to go with him to a Charity Auction at the Civic Centre the following evening "And not only that, I ain't got no money to give to any charities, not even to buy a bloody raffle ticket, they get most of mine already" She'd giggled again "Oxfam, Save the Children, where do you think I buy me clothes?"

"Oh, ha ha, very funny, come on, Molls, it'll be fun, and we'll get a free feed and I think there might be free booze with the dinner"

Matt was the tenant who had moved into the other bed-sitter above the bookies and initially Molly had been horrified at the thought of sharing the facilities with someone else, especially a very young bloke who had ornate blue tattoos like sleeves up each arm and who played heavy metal music at full volume half the night but Matt had turned out to be even more fastidious than she was, the kitchenette and the bathroom positively gleamed when it was his turn to clean them, and even better, he was a 100% committed gay, so that she never felt the need to lock her door at night. He also had a tele which he was happy to share, and was generous with coins for the electric meter when she ran out, so that she considered him to be the ideal house mate. She had no idea of what he did for a job, she was pretty convinced that it was most likely something a bit dodgy, but he'd turned up in the café with two tickets for this event, apparently given to him by someone for some reason, 'best not to ask' was Norm's take on that, and had started badgering her into going with him.

"Okay, if I can find something to wear and as long as you promise we won't get thrown out for eating someone else's dinner"

Out of season Weston was a very different place to the one Molly had moved to in the summer, the customer base at the café had stayed pretty much the same, but there was more of a relaxed feeling, everyone seemed to have more time and most of the customers were now known to her by name and they, in turn, treated her like a kid sister or a pet, taking the piss out of her attempts to get them to eat salad, saying that they went to the café to get away from bloody nagging women. The times when she longed to be back in Bath were now getting very few and far between, the memories were fading fast and her army memories were fading even faster. She still rang Belinda every week and there still hadn't been any further activity, no-one seemed to be looking for her now, so that she was beginning to think it would be safe to go home and see the family for Christmas. She'd gone back to her natural hair colour and now the only thing stopping her was her fear that she might be wrong and that her nightmare would start all over again.

The dress she'd found in the Heart thingy charity shop smelt okay and didn't actually look too bad, one of the advantages of being very small was that she fitted into stuff that most people ignored and left on the racks, although she'd had big doubts when they'd arrived at the Civic Centre, thinking that their appearance screamed 'poor'. Matt was wearing a dinner jacket which was at least two sizes too big, she'd got no idea where he'd got it from, most likely Oxfam, and a pair of jeans, but at least his white shirt and jeans were ironed which made a change for him, but she now thought that the sort of pinkish purple coloured dress she'd bought looked more like a sodding bridesmaid's dress than anything else. She'd whispered to Matt that she felt bad because it didn't seem like the sort of do that would be having tombola or selling raffle tickets and she very much doubted if someone would come round with a bucket looking for donations later and they had no money to join in any sort of auction. Matt had said that he was bloody glad to hear that they wouldn't want him to buy raffle tickets because he hadn't got any spare money but he thought that it was brilliant that there were all these waiters walking around with free booze, and the best bit was that no-one was counting, which made Molly laugh.

Dinner was standard mass catering turkey and Brussel sprouts and rock hard roast potatoes with stuffing, dry, somewhat tasteless but _free_ as Molly kept reminding Matt, who was moaning, followed by a heavy, stodgy lump of Christmas pudding with a lump of cold custard, which judging from the bowls at their table, no-one actually ate. Still, as Matt had promised, there was wine. The auction started straight after dinner and it dawned on them both very quickly that it was absolutely vital that they sat on their hands as Molly mouthed 'Fuck me, how much?' so that they'd ended up with the serious giggles and had attracted a lot of unwanted attention from the other punters on their table. She was beginning to have her doubts as to whether they should actually be there at all, tickets or no tickets, and as she had no idea where he'd got the tickets from she was almost expecting to get thrown out at any second, but definitely before the dancing started.

-OG-

"New boyfriend?"

She'd gone in search of the loos and was on her way back to their table when she'd quite literally bumped into him. For some reason she'd caught his eye and he had been watching her ever since they'd sat down for the truly horrible dinner they'd just been served. He wasn't sure to start with, the girl was sitting way on the other side of the room with her back to him and he didn't have a clear view because there were a lot of people in the way, and the trademark scarlet hair had disappeared, but he'd found his eyes getting drawn back to her over and over as she laughed and joked with the young bloke sitting next to her, increasing his certainty that it was Molly. It was when she'd got up and walked towards the cloakrooms that he was 100% sure and decided to walk over and lay in wait to see whether he could talk to her.

"Nah, he's my housemate and anyway, I think he'd most likely prefer you"

He jerked his head for her to follow him as he started to climb the stairs onto the balcony that overlooked the floor where people were still bidding stupid amounts of money for stuff they didn't want and would probably take to the nearest charity shop or car boot sale when they stopped showing off or sobered up.

"You found somewhere nice to live in Weston then? Like the hair by the way"

"Thanks" she giggled "but I dunno about it being nice, we got a place over the bookies in Shore road"

He shook his head as they got to the top of the stairs and then stopped and looked over the balcony to the floor below where people were bidding stupid amounts of money for all sorts of stuff, mostly useless tat as far as Molly could tell.

"And you're okay? found a job?"

"Yeah, you?

"Yep"

"So you was wrong then, they didn't chuck you on the scrapheap"

"No, not yet" He looked at her for the first time since they'd got to the top of the staircase and chewed at his bottom lip "Didn't think this would be your sort of thing"

"What me? I give to charities all the time, mate"

"Really?"

"Yeah, but not the way you think, look just forget it, it was a joke, okay?"

He smiled and turned back to look down from the dark balcony where there were no lights on, it was just lit by the light from the room below and it struck decidedly chilly.

"Are we allowed up here? I mean, it don't feel like anyone put the bloody heating on, it's freezing"

He took off his dinner jacket and draped it round her shoulders "Better?" and then snorted a slight laugh as he looked down, his jacket buried her. She slipped her arms through the sleeves so that just the very tips of her fingers showed, loving the feeling of the warmth of his body on it as she breathed in the still familiar smell of him from the smooth expanse of black flannel. He stood next to her and leaned on the balcony railings, resting his white shirt sleeves on the top rail and watching without speaking or looking at her as the auction came to a close and the floor was cleared for dancing.

"You here on your own?"

"Nope, mum and dad are down there somewhere"

"They okay?"

"You should go and find them, say hello, show them that you're okay, they were very worried about you when you disappeared like that"

"When you told me to piss off you mean?"

He turned his head to look at her as she continued, turning away from him and putting her hands on the rail as she leaned over to look at the people below "Didn't you tell them that we'd had a one night stand and that you told me to do one?"

"It wasn't like that, you know it wasn't, you were never a one night stand and I didn't tell you to do one"

"What would you call it then?"

"You lied to me, Molly; you shouldn't have lied to me"

"Whatever" She took off his jacket and gave it back to him "Here" then turned and started walking back down the stairs, determined not to look back at him as she scanned the crowd below for Mr. or Mrs. J. She was almost at the bottom when she turned her head slightly and glanced back to where he stood, motionless on the balcony, watching her walk away. She hoped that Matt hadn't been thrown out and was still at their table, because she wanted nothing more than to leave and go and buy a cheap bottle of wine and a giant bar of Cadbury's Dairy Milk and then go home, it had taken her three months to get her life back and three minutes for it all to go to shit again and the worst of it was, she knew he was right.

When he was a kid his mum used to call his sulky stubborn obstinacy 'cutting off his nose to spite his face' and if he was now talking to one of his squaddies, he would call it 'having shit for brains' but the end result was just about the same and now, at nearly 32 he'd watched her walk away without any outward show of emotion as he stood there and kicked himself for behaving like a petulant schoolboy.

-OG-

He had been sitting on a cold concrete step for more than an hour hoping that it would eventually pay off and had smiled as he remembered his grandmother repeatedly warning him that he'd get piles if he sat on something cold. He knew that she wasn't at home because he'd spent the first ten minutes ringing periodically on the door bell and he knew it was the right place, or at least he hoped it was, he'd walked the length of Shore Road and it was the only bookie. Just as he was about to give up and go home, he watched as she turned the corner and walked down the road from the seafront hanging onto her housemate's arm, the pair of them shrieking with laughter. He got to his feet and waited for her.eart


	6. Chapter 6

**Author's notes: Sorry, I should have mentioned that I wouldn't be able to up-date until today, I promised my very long suffering other half that I wouldn't go near the lap top over the weekend as we had a lot of family stuff planned.**

 **The Day I Went Missing**

"Sod off" Molly's greeting was straight to the point as he stood up from his perch on the grubby step outside their front door; she had a bottle of wine and a carrier bag swinging from the hand that wasn't clutching her housemate.

"Can I talk to you?"

"Nah, I'm going indoors with Matt here and I'm gonna drink some wine and then I'm gonna eat loads of chocolate and then I'm gonna drink some more wine, and I don't _ever_ wanna talk to you _ever_ again, never _, ever_ again …. bye"

"I really am sorry, you know"

"Are you? Am I supposed to give a shit?" Molly shrugged as though she couldn't care less whether he was sorry or not, and Charles realised that she sounded as though she was drunk.

Matt took his key out of the pocket of his jeans and unlocked the small door next to the entrance to the shop and banged the timer button inside to turn the lights on over the stairs, all the time shooting Charles extremely dubious looks over his shoulder and trying to reassure himself that this was the bloke that he'd seen her talking to earlier in the evening. When she'd come back to their table and told him that she wanted to leave straight away, she hadn't mentioned him at all, but it was obvious now that they were definitely not strangers. Matt was hovering just inside the front door unsure of whether it was safe to leave her there on her own because it would seem that she had a real problem with him.

"You going to be alright Molls?"

"Yeah, he's just going" She appeared to Matt to be sobering up remarkably quickly and was no longer laughing or slurring her words and she also seemed to have forgotten that she'd been complaining bitterly about being desperate for a wee as they'd made their unsteady way back along the sea front.

"I should have listened to you shouldn't I? I didn't even start to listen, I didn't even try. I know I was a complete arse when I didn't stop and think and I didn't give you a proper chance to explain and I'm really, really sorry that I didn't"

"Is that it?"

"Yep, I don't know what else I can say"

"Okay, well if that's what you came here to say, you've said it now, so you can sod off" She pushed past Matt into the hallway and started to clamber up the stairs without looking back at Charles who was standing outside the front door as Matt dithered as to whether or not he should shut the door in his face "and I need a wee"

"I really wanted to ask you about your medal" Charles called up the stairs to her retreating back, he couldn't think of anything else to say that might stop her walking away from him for the second time that evening.

"How the fuck did you know about that, who told you?"

Molly had stopped dead half way up the stairs and turned round to face him, looking him in the face for the first time since she'd got home and found him waiting outside. She had an expression of pure horror on her face.

"No-one told me, I looked you up, it's all on-line"

"What else was there, what else did you find out about me?"

"Nothing" He stepped inside the doorway "Will you let me come up for a few minutes so that you can tell me what all this is about, I promise, just a few minutes and you can tell me and I'll just listen, then I'll go"

"I don't want you to come up; I want you to leave me alone"

"Okay, if you don't want me to come up we can have this conversation with you on the stairs needing a wee and me out in the street, where it's bloody freezing by the way"

"I'll get Matt to shut you out"

"Matt's not going to shut me out, and he's not going to throw me out either" He looked at Matt who was now stepping from one foot to the other, obviously wishing he wasn't involved in whatever was going on here. He'd had more than enough to drink for one night and he wanted to get his head down and anyway he didn't fancy his chances against someone who not only looked fit, but was at least ten inches taller than him and about twice as broad as his skinny frame.

"Leave me out of this, Molls"

"Oh, thanks a bloody bunch mate"

Molly pulled a face as she turned and started back up the stairs without saying anything else to Charles, she was aware he was following her but didn't know how to stop him or even if she wanted to any more. She knew that she was being really unfair blaming him for everything that had gone wrong between them, she was the one who'd deceived him not the other way round, and she was beginning to wish that she hadn't already drunk the best part of a bottle of cheap wine, she couldn't think straight, her head was muzzy and she was desperate for a wee.

-OG-

Matt had disappeared through one of the doors on the landing and closed it firmly behind him, leaving Charles on the landing leaning up against a very meagre work surface in the tiny kitchenette which was next to the door that Molly had vanished through, presumably the bathroom. The lights on the stairs had gone out, the timer had obviously switched them off and Charles couldn't see where the switch was in the dark, so he was left standing in the pitch black, wondering whether it actually was the bathroom she'd gone into and not her bedroom so that he'd be left standing on this cold and draughty landing all night.

The noise of the toilet flushing followed by water running came as a relief as she flung the door open, the light from the bathroom briefly illuminating the space where he stood, before Molly pulled the cord and switched it off, plunging them back into pitch blackness.

"You still here? I thought you was gonna sod off"

He didn't bother to answer as she opened the door next to Matt's room and went in, leaving the door open for him to follow as she turned the light on and went and closed the thin cotton curtains. He looked around and tried his best not to pull a face, to say the room was basic was flattering, it was small and grotty, scrupulously clean and tidy, but it struck cold, the faded wallpaper was starting to peel off under the window and it smelt very damp. He was used to small, basic rooms in barracks, but not like this, this was immensely depressing and he felt an overwhelming guilt that he was responsible for her living here and not at Royal Crescent. She put on a small electric fire which would struggle to fight off the damp chill of the room and then went and fed a meter from the small pile of coins on the window sill.

The room was dominated by a smallish double bed and there was nowhere else to sit, so she sat cross legged at the top and leaned back against the wall then looked at him as he sat on the foot of the bed with his head down, looked at his feet then turned his head sideways to look at her.

"What do you wanna know?"

"What happened, and why you didn't tell me you've got a bloody Military Cross and why you told me you hadn't served in Afghan?"

"I never, I never said I was there and I never said I wasn't, I never told you nothing about me, and I don't talk about getting a bleeding medal because it was the worst fucking thing that's ever happened to me, okay? and I really wanted to forget it, so, if that's it, you can sod off now"

"Why was it the worst thing that ever happened to you?" He again ignored what she'd said about him leaving.

"Because" she swallowed hard "as well as the bloody medal I got meself a bleeding stalker, and if you bust me I'll have to shift me arse and move somewhere else and start over and I don't want to, I like it here"

"How do you mean, bust you?"

"There's a" she shrugged and hesitated, then shrugged again "a sort of warrant out for me arrest"

"Shit, Molly, what the fuck for? I thought you said you hadn't done anything illegal" He thought for a minute then laughed a bit nervously "You didn't shoot him, did you?"

"Wish I had"

She'd opened her bottle of wine and was swigging it back out of a large coffee mug so that Charles started to worry about how pissed she was going to get if she kept on doing that for much longer.

"Is that a good idea?" He nodded at the bottle as she picked it up from the floor next to the bed and went to top up her mug again "You're going to feel horrible in the morning"

"Why, want some?" She waved the bottle in his direction, saying whoops as some wine slopped out of the bottle onto her dress and the duvet next to where she'd stretched her legs out.

"No thanks, I'm driving"

"Oh, are you going sod off now? … Bye"

"No I'm not" He got up from the end of the bed and went and sat next to her, taking the coffee mug of wine out of her hand and putting it on the floor next to his side of the bed, and then with just a brief struggle removed the wine in the same way as she'd started to swig it straight out of the bottle "Tell me what happened?"

"It's none of your fucking business"

"I know it's not, but I want to know what happened to you" He waved a hand round the room "Why is there a warrant?

"There was this subpoena thing for me to go to court and … I know I said I wasn't AWOL, but I might have been, just a little bit, sort of for a couple of days"

"Don't tell me you ignored a subpoena?"

"Okay"

"Okay what?"

"Okay, I won't tell you"

"Christ alive, how did someone who got a Military Cross end up ignoring a subpoena, going AWOL and living in a shit-hole like this?"

"What, apart from shagging some bleeding Rupert you mean?"

"I presume you're talking about me and not some other Rupert"

"Course I'm talking about you"

"Well then, yep, apart from that" He put his arm round her shoulders and squeezed "I know a lot of this is my fault, you living here, I mean, but when you got this stalker it was way before you met me, so why the fuck didn't you report it? Why didn't you get the army or even the civvie police to deal with him?"

"Because he is the army, dickhead, that's why"

"Before I got the bleeding medal I was happy, you know, loved what I was doing, well most of the time, and I never really thought I should have got it anyway, I were just doing me job, but after, well the first few weeks were magic, and then I got deployed back to Afghan and it was just like the first time to start with except me new boss was a bit of a perv. I didn't really know him, it was a different lot to the first time, because first go I was a battle casualty replacement, sort of temporary, but this was supposed to be permanent"

She took a deep breath and gave him a sideways glance to check on his expression as she bent her knees, putting her arms round them and resting her chin on top as she stared into space, remembering.

"The lads were okay, more than okay once they'd stopped taking the piss all the time, they were a good bunch and they seemed almost proud of me, or so they kept saying, mind they might have just been taking the piss, but the boss was a different ball bag, he gave me the bleeding creeps. He kept on saying stuff, all the time, about me and to me, and about me medal, cos he seemed a bit too, I dunno, impressed or something and he kept on praising me all the time, giving me loads of attention, which was well embarrassing. He was always looking at me and it was the way he watched me when I walked around, I could sort of feel his eyes following me about and the way he stood too close, kept touching me shoulder or me arm, and he seemed to always be behind me when I was queuing for food, far too close so that I could feel him breathing down me neck, and I weren't imagining it. After a bit, I began to think that someone had been going through me stuff, nothing ever seemed to be where I'd left it, so I started out feeling a bit, you know, uncomfortable and then it started to make me flesh creep"

"Then the lads were taking the piss again, about me being the boss's favourite this time, so as soon as we got home, I asked for a transfer. When the bloody paperwork hit his desk, he called me into his office and told me that he'd only sign off on it if I'd be a bit nicer to him when I weren't under his command, a sort of trade off which made me bloody furious when I realised what he was asking for, and I should have done something then, stood up to him or something, but I didn't. I thought I didn't need any help, that I could handle it because I'm hard as nails, me, so I sort of agreed, but I weren't gonna follow through, it was just that I'd have said anything to get away from him and I thought that would be an end of it"

"And it wasn't?" His voice was quiet as he prompted her to carry on.

"Nah, was it buggery. I was posted to Headley Court, sorry I never told you about that by the way, I was shit scared you'd mention me to someone there and they'd tell you they'd never heard of Maggie Dawkins or you'd see some photos or something and recognise me. I loved it there but instead of me getting away from him it felt like he was in me bleeding life all the time, everywhere I went in me time off, he was there, even if I just went out for a run, every time I turned round he was lurking somewhere, I think he was following me, well, that's what it bleeding felt like, and he'd try really hard to talk to me all the time, asking me about me love life 'n that, well me sex life really, and telling me that he cared about me, and I kept on asking him to leave me alone.

Then I began to think that me stuff was being moved about again, things weren't where I was bloody sure I'd left them, and I sort of felt like someone had been touching it, it felt like me knickers 'n that had been moved about. I couldn't think how he'd be able to get into somewhere that was locked, well unless he had a key of course, so I ended up putting a chair up against me door at night, just in case. I sort of got to be a bag of bleeding nerves, when I wasn't at work I spent all me time looking over me shoulder checking to see where he was"

Charles put his arm back round her shoulder, he desperately wanted to comfort her, but she shrugged it off.

"I couldn't report him, the boss I mean, I mean I would have needed some proof or something and there weren't any, he'd only deny it; say I was imagining it and who was going to believe me over him? He'd never texted nor did nothing I could prove, and never when there was witnesses, so going through channels or whatever, wasn't a goer, so I took the only way out and decided to quit"

"I'd already done me 4 and a bit so I was free to go at the end of me time at Headley, but a couple of days before it was over, I had to go to the office and they told me that there'd been what they called an 'incident' and that one of the patients had died unexpectedly, which I knew anyway. The boss said the death were 'unexplained and suspicious' and that there was a chance that he'd maybe got hold of some drugs, or hoarded his sedatives or something so there was gonna have to be an enquiry. As I was one of the last people to see him alive and I was supposed to have watched him take his sleeping pills, which I'm sure I did" even though she said she was sure, he thought that she sounded a bit doubtful "There was a subpoena for me to appear, he said that normally they wouldn't bother at this stage but because I was leaving, ….. and I had to sign for it, to show I'd got it. He told me that it didn't make no difference that I weren't gonna be in the army anymore, I had to show up in court and if I didn't there'd be a warrant for perverting the course of justice so that I'd end up in jail and that they'd got me old home address where they could find me once I was out, but if I moved I'd have to give them me new address"

"Me old boss had left me alone for a couple of weeks so I thought I was doing the right thing leaving, but I saw him later that day and the fucker told me that because of this enquiry thing, he'd be able to find me wherever I went, that I couldn't hide, and I knew he were right. He was threatening me, the way he was talking, the way he was looking at me, and he weren't gonna stop the shit or let me escape, he weren't gonna leave me alone whether I was in the army or not, so this was the only way to get away from him, to get away from it all"

"I ain't got a scoobie what happened at that enquiry, I still don't know how he died, whether I did anything wrong, I mean I don't think so, but….. " she shrugged "I kept trying to look it up on your dad's lap-top, but I couldn't find nothing and I don't know whether there's a warrant out for me or not, but I would think so. I never showed up for me last few days, so I'm most likely down as AWOL as well, and I've had no contact with anyone since that day, apart from me mum, and she had some visits from army looking for me, but not for a bit now"

"I spent the first few weeks hiding by sleeping on a mate's sofa, then I dyed me hair red, well, it weren't supposed to be like a bleeding traffic light" she giggled slightly "it was supposed to be auburn, and then I shifted to Bath to look after your mum and dad"

-OG-

 **Author's Notes: I spent quite some time researching the effects of stalking, what it is, how it starts and how victims are usually very strong and independent people, mostly women who wouldn't be seen as natural targets at all for this sort of thing. Being stalked takes away confidence so that victims end up doubting themselves and afraid that they're imagining things.**

 **I hope you enjoyed it, if that's the right word, and thank you for all your feedback and support so far, the second half of this story is all about sorting things out and taking revenge.**


	7. Chapter 7

**Starting Over**

There was complete silence in the room once she'd finished telling him the bare bones of what had happened, there was an awful lot more that she could have told him, things she'd left out because they sounded so stupid, even to her, as if she'd been imagining them, even though she was certain she hadn't imagined any of it, but even so she left them out of her explanation.

"Molly…..…."

"Nah, don't say nothing, I don't wanna hear what I could have done or what I should have done or nothing, you wanted to know what'd happened so now you do, and I'm sorry that I lied to you and now you can sod off"

"Nope, can't do that and I wasn't going to say any of that"

"Yeah you were, but you do what you bleeding like, I'm tired, I'm going to bed"

She got off the bed and struggled out of her charity shop dress, dropped it on the floor in a heap, then crawled under the duvet in her underwear, turned her back on him and closed her eyes.

Now that she'd finished telling him how and why she'd ended up in Bath, and why she hadn't been using her own name he didn't actually know what to say to her. He'd been so focussed on the fact that she'd lied and he'd so much wanted to know why she'd done that, that he hadn't given a thought to what came next. Before he could think of anything to say, the wine she'd drunk caught up with her and she'd fallen asleep when her head hit the pillow and was now actually snoring slightly as he got up and turned off the fire, then removed his shoes and jacket and stretched out next to her, put his arm round her and closed his eyes.

Sometime during the night she woke up and prised open her hangover swollen and glued together eyes and realised that her feeling of being safe came from the fact that she was being held securely in his arms but that didn't stop the tears that started to roll from the corners of her eyes soaking the pillow. It wouldn't matter how many people she told or who they were, or even what happened next, it still felt like all the things, all the achievements she'd been so proud of, had gone, that the life she'd worked so hard for was fucked and that things would never, ever be the same again. As she started dropping off to sleep she couldn't for the life of her work out what he was still doing there, in her bed and still wearing all his clothes, so they obviously hadn't had sex, when the last thing she remembered telling him was to sod off.

-OG-

"You still here?"

Molly thought she could remember asking him that before, but couldn't quite remember when, as she dragged herself out of bed and went off to the bathroom to get washed and ready for work, the fact that it was the crack of dawn on Saturday and that she had the hangover from hell didn't mean that she didn't have to drag herself to the café and open up.

"Molly, we need to talk about what we're going to do about all this"

He wanted more than anything to put his arms round her but he wasn't quite sure what she'd do, how she'd react, he had spent a good part of the night cuddling her when she was fast asleep and wouldn't push him away, as well as trying to come up with some sort of plan for sorting it all out because he desperately wanted to make it all better, but so far he'd drawn a complete blank.

"I don't wanna do nothing about it, just leave me alone and it's not your bleeding problem anyway, is it?"

"Well, I'm going to help whether you like it or not, so that makes it my problem so you can stop being such a grumpy cow. I never meant for everything to go tits up like it did, or for you to bugger off so that I didn't know where you were, so, shall we have a look and see what we can do about all this or do you want to carry on hiding and carry on letting that little scrote win?" He knew she was listening to him even though she still had her back turned so that he couldn't see her face "Come on, I know I behaved like a complete knob, but I am on your side and we need to get this sorted"

She wanted to tell him that he hadn't been the one who'd behaved badly, that every time he blamed himself she felt worse, that she _had_ lied to him over and over again, that she had deceived him even when she'd started having feelings for him and that she didn't blame him for being angry with her when he found out, because it had been her fault that they'd fallen out, but stubborn pride wouldn't let her.

"What did you think was going to happen?"

"I don't know, but I thought you'd still be there when I got back from Headley, I never thought you'd just piss off like that, and where the fuck are you going now?" He realised that she'd put her coat on, tied her hair into a pony tail and was winding a scarf round her neck.

"I'm going to work, where do you think I'm going?"

"It's Saturday, it's only just gone seven, and you haven't even had a cup of tea. I thought we could go somewhere, maybe get a coffee, or a tea"

"I work in a bleeding café, and we're open Saturdays, so I work Saturdays" She smirked at him "I'll get me breakfast at work. You can come with me if you want, Norm does a lovely fry-up and you can have a cup of coffee with that"

"Lovely"

She'd had her tongue firmly in her cheek when she'd invited him to the café for breakfast, it was actually the last thing she'd expected him to agree to, especially when he saw the place, she thought he would take one look and run away screaming but now that he was walking down the street with her, she was at a loss to know what to say to him. She was at even more of a loss to know how she was going to introduce him to Norm and the others who were bound to think that she'd just slept with him.

-OG-

He'd been sitting there for as long as he could, nursing one truly horrible cup of instant coffee which tasted even worse now it was almost stone cold and had watched and listened as Molly bantered with what was obviously the regular clientele; no-one would know from the way she looked and acted that she had a terrible hangover and was surviving on strong tea and Nurofen. As he watched it was easy for him to imagine her in a mess tent with a load of squaddies giving as good as she got with the endless piss-taking that went on, it was the very first time he'd thought about her as an ex-soldier and he wondered just how much she missed it.

The breakfast had been surprisingly good, he'd actually been starving, and it was a far better fry-up than standard army rations, but he didn't want to go now that he'd finished eating. He didn't want a fresh cup of the poison that was masquerading as coffee either, he just wasn't sure how much longer he could sit there and pretend to be drinking it. She'd introduced him simply as a friend and they had all looked him up and down as though every single one of them was her dad and he'd smiled to himself at the way people, well mostly men and including him if he was being honest, took one look at her and saw this tiny, fragile looking girl and wanted to protect her, to look after her. It was pretty ironic considering that she was not only more than capable of looking after herself but had won a medal for the sort of bravery that most of them, if not all, wouldn't even begin to be capable of, that is before one shitty little bastard had used his power to turn her whole life upside down and he'd still got no idea what to do about that.

The breakfast rush had finished when she flopped down on the bench opposite him with a slice of toast and a cup of tea and offered him another cup of coffee, smirking when he shuddered.

"Are you going to sit there on yer bum all day?"

"Possibly" he smiled at her "What time do you finish?"

"When Norm says, and that'll be when he decides there's not gonna be any more punters"

"Can't you ask him? We've got stuff we need to talk about, things to sort out"

Norm had been his usual kind self and told her to bugger off before he changed his mind so that half an hour later they were walking along the windswept and chilly seafront in complete silence, neither of them sure how to start a conversation. Charles was cold and frowsty, he had no coat and was still wearing the clothes he'd worn to the auction, clothes that he'd then slept in and he hadn't even washed his face properly so that he was pretty sure that he smelt as horrible as he felt. What he really wanted to do was go home and to take her with him, something he was pretty sure wasn't going to happen.

"God, I bloody stink" He pulled a face as she grinned at him "I'm rank and I need to go and have a shower and get some clean clothes, are you going to come with me?"

"Yeah, you're right, you're minging and no, I'm not coming with you"

"Listen, the first thing I think we need to do is to find out if there is any sort of warrant, whether anyone's actually looking for you"

"How you gonna do that? You ain't gonna tell no-one where I am, are you? Can't we just leave it alone?"

"No we can't, and of course I'm not going to tell anyone where you are, and I haven't got a bloody clue how we're going to find out what's happening, I'll talk to dad first and see what he suggests, then see who he knows that might be able to help"

"Charles?"

"What?"

"Thanks"

"Molly?"

"What?"

"You're welcome" He laughed "Now, how about you stop all this bollocks and come home with me, mum would love to see you"

"Nah I can't, it wouldn't feel right"

"Well, promise me you won't do a bloody bunk again before I get back"

"I promise" She suddenly felt lost and a bit miserable at the thought of going back to her horrible little room on her own "When do you think you'll be back?"

"Later, not long" He stopped walking and turned to face her, smiled and put his hands on her shoulders then tucked a stray curl behind her ear which promptly blew back across her face "I'll take you out for something to eat if you're good"

She grinned at him and then felt herself get swept up in a hug as he apologised again for smelling terrible, and said that he would love to kiss her but that he hadn't cleaned his teeth for what felt like a month and that anyway he could still taste the god-awful coffee that she'd tried to poison him with.

-OG-

"Good news first?"

"Yeah"

"Can't find you listed as AWOL anywhere so you can probably stop worrying about that" He took a deep breath and tried to pin a reassuring smile on his face "But whether or not there's a live warrant, Molly, we don't know, so the first thing we have to do is to get you a solicitor, dad has had a word with one of his friends from the golf club and he's volunteered, so if that's alright with you he'll talk to Army Legal Services"

"Oh shit"

It was one thing to be hiding away because she feared that she was in deep trouble, but it was quite another realising that she might have to face it, that she couldn't just pack up and run away again. There was also the small matter of paying for a solicitor when she'd got no money.

"Dad says he reckons that the worst you'll get is a fine, probably a bloody huge one, but you won't go to jail, he's pretty sure about that, and mum wants you to come home with me, she thinks you need some looking after"

"What have you been saying to her?"

"Nothing"

"This fine?" She chewed at her bottom lip as she looked at up him "How much does he think it'll be? And does he reckon they'll give me time to pay, like five bob a week or something?"

"Let's just go and get something to eat"

He shook his head and gave a small snort of laughter as he took her hand and started walking in the direction of the better end of the resort where the classier restaurants were located. Walking back towards Shore Road after they'd eaten he put his arm round her shoulders and asked her again to come home with him so that his mum could spoil her, and once again she turned him down. Why she was turning him down she didn't exactly know, except that it felt all wrong to allow them to make a huge fuss of her in the circumstances.

"I presume you're not going to invite me to come up for coffee" He smiled at her as he smoothed her windblown hair back from her face.

"I don't do coffee, a tea bag does me and if I robbed some of Matt's you'd think it was disgusting, but then you wouldn't be there long enough to drink it anyway"

"Right" He smiled wryly, getting her message and then leaned forward and kissed her gently on the cheek as if she was his maiden aunt, "I'm back to barracks tomorrow, so I'll call you and I'll make sure that the solicitor calls you if there's any news"

"Charles" she couldn't help the little giggle that escaped as he lifted his eyebrows in an unspoken question "You might gonna need to have me phone number then"

-OG-

He was as good as his word and called her every evening when he got back to barracks even though their conversations were slightly stilted, but it seemed like a very long week to Molly, she was scared shitless about the news the solicitor might have for her, no matter what Charles had said she was still half convinced that she was going to end up in jail, but was even more worried that there didn't seem to be any news at all. After months of hiding and doing all she could to avoid even thinking about the situation, now she was desperate for answers, suddenly she needed to know. The weekend stretched out a bit because Charles was Duty Officer which meant that he couldn't be around until Monday or Tuesday at the earliest and she was beating herself up for not going to Royal Crescent when he'd tried to persuade her, she was sick of being on her own and even more sick of feeling bleeding miserable. She was sick of feeling like a victim; it seemed like a lifetime ago when she'd last laughed.

-OG-

"I feel sick"

"No you don't, you'll be fine, you got a medal because you're brave, remember?"

"Stop taking the piss"

They were sitting in the waiting room of some very posh solicitors' chambers in Bath and Molly kept looking around her and trying to work out how much Mr. J's mate charged by the hour for his advice, a bloody shed-load was her guess judging by the state of the place, and in spite of what Charles said about her being brave, her stomach was churning with nausea at the thought of what this bloke was going to tell her.

"Right then, Miss Dawes, or may I call you Molly?" They'd gone through to his office, Molly on legs which felt as though they were stuffed with cotton wool and didn't quite belong to her.

She nodded as Mr J's friend, or Clive as he insisted that she call him, who was miles younger and better looking than she'd expected, she couldn't help thinking he looked a bit like Clark Kent, nodded at Charles then smiled at her and put his glasses back on to look at the paperwork in front of him. She tried hard to swallow with a totally dry mouth as Charles put his hand on her knee and squeezed, doing his best to give her as much support as he could without actually saying anything.

-OG-

 **Author's Notes Thank you for your reviews, I'm dead curious as to what scenarios people did come up with, although I probably shouldn't ask in case it makes me go "Oh, shit I wish I'd thought of that" Maybe someone will tell me once the story is finished.**


	8. Chapter 8

"Now, this subpoena" He looked up "There never was an actual enquiry, because the patient" He looked down again to check the details "Corporal Mackintosh, is that right?" Molly nodded "Well, the post mortem showed that he died of natural causes, that he actually had an aneurism, which is ….."

"Yeah I know what an aneurism is" She couldn't stop herself from interrupting then regretted it, it felt as if she'd been rude, but her sense of relief was so enormous that she could feel beads of sweat breaking out on her forehead and under the hair on the back of her neck, it was still awful that he'd died like that, but he hadn't got hold of any drugs or hoarded his sleeping pills or nothing, he hadn't killed himself and she couldn't in any way be responsible. She'd kept on saying to everyone that had asked her that she was sure she'd watched him take his pills because that was what she did, but there'd been a small nugget of doubt in her head and she'd never been entirely sure that people believed her, because had she? Or had she just assumed that that's what she'd done because that's what she always did?

"Fair enough, now what I haven't been able to establish is whether there is going to be a Coroner's Inquest. Army Legal Services are notoriously slow to answer any sort of requests for information, but if there is an Inquest it will mean that your subpoena is still relevant, or whether, as is far more likely, that it all went away when they established the cause of death. Now, the best course of action that we can take is for us to write a grovelling apology on your behalf for not keeping the court informed of your whereabouts, because even if it does all go away you must never ignore a court, military or civil. As I believe I told your father, Charles, it was unlikely you'd be sent to jail, that even if there had been a warrant issued you'd probably be looking at a fine, but, and you should make no mistake about it, a subpoena is a court instruction, an order if you like, and if the circumstances had been different you could well be looking at being charged with contempt and for that you could have been jailed" As she listened to his lecture she couldn't help feeling like naughty schoolgirl who was being well and truly ticked off, although she knew that he was right "But let's not worry about that now, we'll hold off on sending the letter until we hear back from ALS as to what's happening, but I think you can probably relax. We'll let you know when the letter's ready for signature and if you will need to attend an inquest, so be sure and let us have your change of address if you move" He smiled to show that the last bit had been intended as a bit of a joke admonishment.

"Really? That's it?"

"Certainly that's it, just come in, sign the letter when it's ready and that's it"

Molly felt the tingle of tears prickling her eyes as Charles stood up and shook Clive's hand, the pair of them discussing some mutual acquaintance, and Clive asking him to pass a golf club message onto Mr. J while she didn't take in a word they were saying to each other and for a second or two didn't even notice that his hand was extended towards her waiting for her to shake it and say goodbye.

"What about the bill?" She whispered to Charles as they left Clive's office, bracing herself for getting ready to ask if she could pay in instalments.

"That's the beauty of dad being secretary of the golf club, there's always someone useful and no bill" Charles put his hand on the back of her neck sliding it under her hair and steering her towards the stairs which led back to the exit onto the High Street, and then grabbed her hand and began to pull her along behind him slightly.

"Come on, slowcoach, we need to celebrate that we don't have to ask anyone to bake a cake with a file in it"

"Bleeding comedian"

She didn't know whether to laugh or cry as they got to the bottom of the stairs and out of the door to the street where Charles swept her up in a hug and spun her round despite the bitterly cold wind and the rain that was coming down in torrents. Molly pulled up the hood of her parka and tugged up the zip but Charles was soaked through in the seconds it took him to struggle into his jacket, his expensive cashmere jumper was sticking to him and his hair was flattened against his skull as the raindrops ran down his face and dripped off his nose.

"Shit, what are you crying for? " Rain was also dripping off her face but it was now mingling with the tears that were pouring from her eyes "There's nothing to cry about, come on, it's over, it's finished with"

"Tell you what, it might be best if you just please go away and leave me alone, you don't have to stay, I'll get the train back, I'll be okay"

"Don't do this to me" He muttered as he wrapped his arms round her and pushed the hood of her parka back a bit then brushed her hair away from her hot, damp face and kissed her forehead "Don't push me away" He tried to laugh as he kissed her forehead for a second time "Come on, let's go and get in the car where I won't be standing in a puddle getting my bloody feet soaked"

They sat and looked at each other as they sat in the front seats of the car and he leaned forward and kissed her forehead again then pushed the wet hood of her parka down to her shoulders and kissed across the bridge of her nose and, when she closed her eyes, onto her closed eyelids as she began to cry again, deep searing sobs that wracked her body and sent torrents of tears and snot down her face. She tried to wipe it off with her hand, and then with the handkerchief he pulled out of his pocket, a handkerchief that was almost as wet with rain as her face was with tears.

"Why are you crying?"

"I dunno, I was so bleeding scared … and now I just can't seem to stop"

"Come on" he started the car "Let's get you home"

"I'm not going to your mum and dad's; I wanna go home to Weston"

-OG-

She'd stopped crying by the time he found a space on Shore Road that didn't mean him parking on the double yellow lines, but although she'd got to the trembling breath stage her eyes were red rimmed, all her make-up long since washed away and she looked exhausted. As they walked along to the door by the bookmakers neither of them said a word but this time he didn't ask whether he was invited up or not, he just took the key out of her hand and unlocked the door, then stood back to let her go up the stairs first and followed her.

He kicked her bedroom door shut behind them as he turned her round and pinned her back against it, their mouths meeting in a kiss that was so fierce it was almost clumsy, their teeth clashing until he moved his mouth to one side slightly and the kiss became everything she remembered. He began to move backwards staggering slightly as their lips were still locked together until he fell backwards across her bed, Molly on top of him.

"I've been wanting to do that ever since we were on that balcony at that bloody auction"

"Have you?"

"Yep, you know what else I've been wanting to do?" He rolled her onto her back and his voice was little more than a whisper, soft and teasing and accompanied by fleeting butterfly kisses down her neck, kisses that were so gentle, they were barely there.

"You'd better get that wet jumper off first or you're gonna catch yer bleeding death"

They separated as he sat up and pulled his damp sweater off and then the shirt that he was wearing underneath which also had damp patches on the shoulders and down the front. Molly lay back on the bed and watched him, then started to giggle.

"What's funny? There's nothing funny is there?" He turned round to look at her and saw the huge smirk that was pasted across her face.

"Thought you was gonna do the whole Full Monty there for a minute"

"Do you want me to?" He raised one eyebrow "I will if you want me to"

He didn't wait for her to answer, just laughed then turned back and began to kiss her again. He started to undo the buttons of her shirt, his eyes never leaving her face so that he fumbled slightly as he moved down from button to button, his bottom lip caught between his teeth when he finally pulled her shirt away from her body, slowly as though he was unwrapping a present that he'd been waiting for for months. He eased it off her and threw it on the floor next to his wet clothing then pushed one bra strap down her arm kissing down her body until he fastened his lips on her exposed nipple and tried to undo the clasp at the back one-handed while he stroked her other breast over the lace cup, his thumb rubbing lightly over the tip.

Her bra eventually ended up on the floor with the rest of their clothes and she put her hand on the back of his head and arched her back upwards towards him not wanting him to stop, and knowing that he could actually make her come without doing anything else if he kept it up for long enough. She could feel how much he wanted her, how hard he was against her leg and the desperate rise and fall of his breathing, but there was a tiny corner of her brain that wasn't completely sure that they should be doing this. A bit of her that wasn't sure that she wanted to fall in love with him all over again, she couldn't help remembering how badly it all had gone to shit the last time.

He took a deep breath and rolled away from her "We shouldn't be doing this, I'm sorry, I haven't got anything"

She didn't know whether to be relieved or sorry, perversely now that he'd said that they couldn't because he hadn't got a condom, she desperately wanted to and felt a huge temptation to roll on top of him and make it incredibly difficult for him to carry on exercising the sort of self-control that he'd needed to stop what they had been doing.

-OG-

Cuddling up under the duvet on a wet, cold afternoon in December and watching the light fade through the window where she hadn't drawn the curtains made the room feel almost cosy although they hadn't put the light on so the grottiness was shadowed and they were bickering slightly as to who was going to get up and put the fire on. Charles was pretending to be indignant at the suggestion that he should do it, saying that he'd get cold and that it was her room so it was her responsibility and that he wasn't that much of a gentleman, but Molly won the argument, as she was always going to anyway, he hadn't been seriously refusing to do it, but had been enjoying the way she was trying to persuade him by threatening to keep on touching and teasing with her hands so that he'd ended up growling at her that he would get his revenge, she just had to wait and see. He'd then got up and turned the fire on, feeding the meter as per her instructions and closing the curtains, shutting the winter afternoon out. The room was almost dark but he didn't switch the light on, there weren't any lamps, just the harsh overhead light and neither of them needed to be able to see anything apart from each other.

"I'm sorry I was all whingy 'n that earlier, you know, bawling me bloody eyes out like that"

"You don't whinge"

"Yeah, I do"

"No, you don't, you didn't even whinge when you were telling me about all the stuff that had happened"

"Yeah I did, I sort of remember whinging quite a lot actually"

"I don't want to argue with you, but you didn't, not even when it was obvious that your life had come apart at the seams and that it was all his bloody fault and anyway, you probably don't remember it that well" He laughed "You were pretty pissed at the time"

"Yeah, there was that" she bit her lip "But I don't want you to be sorry for me"

"I'm not sorry for you" he lied "I just want you to have the chance to carry on being brilliant"

"What does that even mean; I don't understand what that means"

"It means ….. that …. I love you"

"Do you?"

"Of course I do, I've loved you ever since you stood by my hospital bed and gave me hell and I keep hoping that you love me a little bit too, because I'm not sure that you'd have been quite so upset with me when it all went to shit if you didn't, love me a bit I mean"

"I weren't that upset" He raised one eyebrow and looked at her "Alright, yeah I was"

He pulled her even closer to him, winding a lock of her hair round his finger into a ringlet as their heads shared a single pillow and he had to keep on telling himself not to start something they couldn't finish, whatever the temptation.

"Mum and dad want you to come and stay for Christmas"

"What about you?"

"They have to let me stay, it's my home, I live there" He laughed, deliberately misunderstanding her.

"No, dickhead, do you want me to come for Christmas?"

There was a very long pause when he raised one eyebrow and smirked at her, then laughed out loud "What a question, Miss Dawes, I'm really not sure how I should answer that"

"Oi, behave yourself" She giggled "I was wondering whether I should go and see me family for Christmas, mum and the kids 'n that"

"Tell me about them" He tried hard to make sure there was no note of disappointment in his voice.

Listening to her describe her childhood in east London and talk about her mother and her many brothers and sisters, Charles was certain that he'd have difficulty remembering their names, there seemed to be so many of them, but he realised just what a wrench it must have been for her to have no contact with them for so long. Yes, it sounded as though there might have been problems when she was growing up and by the sound of it when she'd first joined up, but her deep love for them all, including her grandmother, was abundantly plain, so that he was a bit envious. Being an only child of two only children had meant that they'd had a very small family circle when he was growing up, no aunts or uncles or cousins and now that all his grandparents were dead, it was just him, his parents and Sam and he wondered what Sam would make of a huge extended family. For as long as he could remember the army had been his extended family and he knew how he would feel if it was all suddenly taken away from him, indeed how he had felt when that had seemed like a distinct possibility.

She didn't talk about her father, just mentioned him in passing, and she didn't say very much about her schooldays, just that she'd hated them, but she talked at length about how she'd come to join up and what her career in the army had meant to her, about the lads she'd served with during both tours of Afghan and how happy she'd been, and what had happened when she'd won her medal.

As Charles lay and listened he could hear from her voice just how much she missed it all and he had this feeling of impotent rage boiling away in the pit of his stomach, he hadn't come up with any sort of plan of what to do about her stalker …... yet. They'd needed to get today over with first, but the little shit who'd taken it all away from her had to be dealt with, Charles just wasn't sure yet how he was going to achieve that, apart from taking him down some dark, deserted alleyway somewhere and beating the crap out of him, which, tempting though it was, probably wasn't the best solution.

-OG-

Molly had gone off to east Ham early on Christmas Eve much to Norm's dismay, he'd said he needed her to work, but Charles was pretty sure that what he really meant was that he would miss her when she was away with her family, and that, like him, Norm was a bit worried that she would decide to stay up there with them.

After two days at home Molly felt almost as though she'd never been away, the initial excitement of seeing everyone and everyone seeing her and everyone talking at once and Nan threatening to box her ears for her if she ever pulled a stroke like that again and it being Christmas had now faded back to the normal routines of family. Christmas day had started indecently early and now in mid-afternoon when dinner was finished, the kids were over-tired and bickering, both her dad and her Nan were dozing in chairs and she was sitting at the table with Belinda demolishing a box of liqueur cherries which were making her feel slightly sick, Charles rang.

The minute she'd heard his voice and his Merry Christmas she'd jumped up and gone into the kitchen to talk because she realised just how much she was missing him, so much so that she felt slightly tongue tied and didn't want her mum to notice.

"Yeah, Merry Christmas to you too"

"Are you having a lovely day?"

"Yeah ….. well, sort of, are you?"

"Yep, but it's a bit quiet without you or Sam, when are you coming back? I miss you"

"Do you want to come and get me? Tomorrow?"

"What's the address?"

-OG-

 **Author's notes: Thank you for your reviews, sorry I couldn't upload this last night as I was asked, by the time I got the request and went to do it, our bloody broadband went down again. I think Richard Branson's got it in for me!**


	9. Chapter 9

**A Dish Served Cold**

"Is this 'im? Is this the one what's made such a bleeding pest of himself?"

"No Nan" Molly giggled "Charles is me friend, well, actually he's sort of me boyfriend and I wouldn't be bringing a bleeding stalker home to meet you all, would I?"

"More's the pity, I'm sure me and your mum could sort 'im out" Nan leaned up against the doorframe and looked Charles up and down "Mind you, I'm pretty sure he don't need to be a bit of a creep to get the girls to notice 'im, I'll bet he has to beat them off with a stick"

"Nan, stop it you're embarrassing him"

"How? I only said he didn't look like a pervert, what's embarrassing about that?"

Charles snorted a laugh and looked down at his feet as he tried hard to control the blush that was starting to creep up his neck, he had a feeling that embarrassing people was a sort of hobby with Molly's Nan, but also that, if necessary, she'd fight tooth and nail to protect her granddaughter. It was almost worth setting her on Molly's stalker and standing back to watch the fireworks and fun.

-OG-

"What do you mean I'm your sort of boyfriend?"

They were in the car going back down the M4 as Charles breathed a sigh of relief that his trial by relative was over for one day. Her mum had been very kind to him, making him really welcome and quite obviously trying to make up for the astringent commenting that was coming from her grandmother, commenting that Molly simply ignored as though she was so used to it that she didn't notice it anymore, but Charles thought how much he'd hate to get on the wrong side of her Nan, he had a feeling that it would be a very uncomfortable place to be. There had been no sign of Molly's dad, he'd apparently been doing the hair of the dog in the local, and her younger brothers and sisters had been sprawled in front of the television, the distraction of new games already forgotten in favour of some Disney film, so that they'd barely looked up to acknowledge him. Molly had promised to phone and Facebook and to make sure that she visited and he'd promised to ferry her backwards and forwards whenever he could, none of which had stopped her getting a bit tearful as they'd left and set off for Bath.

She didn't answer the question, just looked at him and smiled, then put her hand on his thigh so that he'd immediately put his left hand over it and held it there, driving down the motorway holding onto the steering wheel with just his right hand.

"Oi, both hands on the wheel" she laughed and picked up his hand and put it back on the wheel as he looked at her and winked "and both bleeding eyes on the road as well"

"Well, stop distracting me then"

"Okay" she took her hand away from his leg, so that he promptly took his hand off the wheel again picked up her hand and put it back on his leg, a lot further up his thigh than before, saying that that wasn't what he'd meant.

The closer they got to Bath the quieter Molly got, she still hadn't seen his parents since the day she'd vanished from Royal Crescent and was filled with a mixture of longing to see them again because she'd got very fond of them, coupled with a shed load of guilt that she'd behaved so thoughtlessly in not letting them know that she was okay. She took a deep breath knowing that she had to face it eventually but was hanging back slightly behind Charles as they went in through the front door. It turned out to be a totally wasted exercise as Mrs. J appeared as soon as she heard his key in the lock and pushed him aside to throw her arms round Molly and sweep her up in a hug while telling her that she should probably give her a good hiding, so that Charles laughed and said that his mother's bark was always, always worse than her bite, which was just as well.

Molly tried to thank Mr. J for his help in arranging for Clive to sort things out for her but he refused to listen, just waved a hand dismissively in the air above his head and walked off when she'd started. He insisted that he didn't know what the 'flipping heck' she was talking about and how about she put the kettle on and made him a cuppa just like old times, because there was no-one else in the house who knew how to make his tea as well as she did and that all coffee freaks make disgusting tea, so that she got the giggles at the well-remembered outraged expression on Mrs. J's face.

-OG-

Charles stood behind her and put his arms round her, resting his chin on top of her head and then trying to push her hair to one side off the back of her neck so that he could nuzzle her and cupping her breasts through her 'T-shirt.

"Mmm, nice tits"

"Oi stop it, where's your mum?" Standing by the sink in the kitchen wasn't the most private place he could have chosen and Molly had visions of Mrs. J appearing in the doorway any second, but despite telling him to stop she was leaning back against him "Where am I supposed to be sleeping?"

"Where do you want to sleep?"

"Thanks that's really bleeding helpful"

He turned her round and put his hands onto her shoulders, smiled down into her eyes, and asked her if she wanted to use her old room because if that was what she wanted then it was fine with him. He cupped her face in his hands and kissed her mouth gently saying that he needed her not to worry or to feel that she had to do anything she wasn't happy with, or sleep anywhere she didn't want to, then burst into laughter at the expression on her face and said that although he meant every word he'd said about wanting her to be happy, of course he wanted her to sleep with him, he loved her.

"Yeah, and it would serve you bloody right if I took notice of all that bollocks you just come out with and went and slept in me old room"

"I know, but you don't really want to, do you?" He ran his thumb over her bottom lip and smiled into her eyes as she gazed up at him biting her bottom lip, half considering doing exactly that to teach him a lesson "Anyway I have some stuff to talk to you about because you need to decide how badly you want to teach this arsehole a lesson" He smiled again "It really is up to you, we don't have to do anything if you don't want to"

"What we gonna do?"

"Well, the first thing we're going to do is get ourselves invited to the Regimental New Year party"

"What bleeding party and how the fuck are we gonna do that?"

"Well, it's in the Officer's Mess, so it'll be me that gets myself invited and sorry, but I think it might be best if you are down as my 'plus one' because we don't want to give him a heads up do we? Now, are you going to listen?"

It took a fair amount of time for Charles to outline his plan for revenge, some of which he had already implemented, and Molly couldn't help echoing his smile of triumph, knowing that if it worked as well as it should there would be one bloke who'd be very sorry he'd ever targeted her.

"What happens if it don't work?"

"We go to plan B"

"What's that?"

"I take the little turd outside and beat the shit out of him"

"Oh"

-OG-

She sat on the side of his bed and started to laugh at her vivid mental picture of Charles taking her tormentor by the collar and hoicking him outside, a sort of cartoon of his feet being way off the ground because Charles was at least a foot taller and would have absolutely no trouble at all beating the little bastard to a pulp. If it hadn't been for the fact that it would be something that would get him in deep hot water, she almost wished it could happen, because although she hated violence there was something very satisfying in visualising the little creep pouring with blood and in physical pain after everything he'd put her through. Charles began to laugh as well, either he was reading her mind or, far more likely, because he was finding her laughter incredibly infectious and was happy to hear her sounding so happy. His arm shot out and he pulled her on top of him so that she could feel his laughter making his chest shake. As she lay there on top of him the mood between them began to change and he stopped laughing as he rolled her onto her back and started kissing her, gently at first and then as he had done the first time she'd been in this bed with him and when they'd been together in her bed during their afternoon exercise in frustration. She could feel him getting hard against her thigh as she looked up into his eyes, which were all pupil, and then closed her own eyes as he started to slip her 'T' shirt off, undoing her bra and throwing it towards the bottom of the bed. She ran her hands across his chest, tracing the muscles under his shirt, and feeling his sharp intake of breath as she pulled it over his head, then put her hand down and touched him through his jeans, hearing him groan and feeling him quicken as she touched him, and loving what she was doing to his breathing.

She put her hand down and unbuttoned his jeans then wrapped her legs round him and wriggled around trying to push them down with her feet, so that he put his hands down and pushed them off, taking his boxer shorts with them, leaving him naked except for his socks. She laughed as he tried to push them off with his feet and then gave up and sat up for a second to pull them off and chuck them somewhere at the bottom of the bed with her bra.

"You need to take your jeans off" he muttered and let go of the wrists that he'd circled with one hand in order to hold her arms above her head while he'd kissed her from her neck down to her breasts and then back up to her face without touching her nipples, making her body arch up towards him with her need for him to stop teasing. As she pushed her jeans down and hooked her hands into the elastic at the lace top of her knickers he put his hand on hers and stopped her "Leave me something to take off"

"Condom?" She had this feeling that maybe he'd forgotten as they rolled around on his bed, not being able to get enough of each other as they tried to make up for lost time and that they were getting very close to being completely carried away, or at least she was.

"Yep, in a second, I promise, in a second"

"No ….. now. Where are they anyway?"

He went from still to fast and hard and deep in one stroke as she squeezed him tighter with her arms, her legs, her everything and then after a few minutes screwed her eyes shut and went into freefall, pulsing around him and feeling that everything was _right,_ that she was where she was meant to be.

Afterwards he rolled off her slightly, worried about crushing her, and dotted little kisses on her face as her luminous eyes looked up at him and their mingled sweat dried on their bodies. Molly picked up the packet of condoms to put them back on the bedside table.

"How long have you had these? You know they have a 'use by' don't you?"

"We'd better use them then hadn't we?"

-OG-

The boutique in Bath was the most expensive shop she'd ever been in, none of the dresses had price tags on them so that they had to find an assistant to help, which reminded Molly that Nan always used to say that if you have to ask some bugger what it costs, you can't bleeding afford it. And she definitely couldn't afford anything in this place. Charles had offered to come shopping with her to help her choose, but Mrs. J had been adamant in her insistence that she wanted to go and that she'd be much better at picking than he would and that he could just pay for it, which made Molly feel very uncomfortable. She didn't want him to pay for her dress and she didn't want to let Mrs. J pick something that was horrendously expensive or, if she was being entirely honest, more to her taste than Molly's, but that was before she found out how much the bloody things cost.

The beaded spaghetti straps and close fitting empire line bodice, low cut and fitting her like a glove, together with the ivory chiffon skirt which alternatively clung and swirled around her legs made her feel more beautiful than she could ever have imagined, even though she was trying it on with her tatty and well-worn converse and would, as Mrs J kept saying, need killer heeled sandals to carry it off. None of that detracted from the fact that she couldn't even begin to afford it.

Mrs. J took absolutely no notice of her protests that she couldn't possibly buy it, as she did what Nan would call 'cocking a deaf 'n' so that Molly ended up carrying posh looking bags with a dress layered in a box with reams of tissue paper and a pair of beaded strappy sandals to match, and a huge feeling of guilt that they'd just spent so much money on something that was just for her wear to a bleeding party.

She'd modelled it for Charles as soon as they'd got home and had gone into apology mode, explaining that it was his mum who'd insisted and who just wouldn't listen. Charles had stood and stared at her in the dress, speechless with his eyes glittering and his cheeks slightly flushed as he'd bitten his bottom lip then smirked at her twirling in front of him, the chiffon fluttering round her legs as she did.

"Stop saying you're sorry, it was worth every single penny, you look beautiful"

"Thank you"

"I'm so proud of you and I can't wait to walk in there and have every bloke in the place wish they were me"

"You're biased"

"No I'm not, now take it off and hang it up before it gets all creased up, but leave the shoes on"

"Pervert"

-OG-

Sam's arrival put a stop to whatever his father had in mind and he took Maggie's reappearance with different coloured hair and a new name completely in his stride, as if it was an everyday occurrence. He flung his arms round her and demanded to know where she'd been and if she'd bought him a present back and whether she was staying so that Molly had bent down and tried to explain that she couldn't stay, that she was just there for a few days, that she lived in Weston now and that she had a job there.

"Why?" Sam wailed "Why do you have to live in Weston, why can't you live here anymore?"

"That is a really good question" Charles spoke before Molly could think of an answer for Sam "Why can't you?"

"Don't start, you know why" Molly gave him a fleeting smile then bit her bottom lip "I can't live here off your parents, I need a job"

"What do you want to do? Have you thought what you're going to do when all this is over I mean, are you going to join up again, go back to being a medic or do you want to do something else?"

"I dunno, will they let me go back do you think, seeing as how?"

"I'm sure they will, you haven't done anything wrong have you and you've got a Military Cross, so why not if that's what you want to do?" He raised his eyebrows at her "They'll probably welcome you back with open arms"

Molly hadn't dared to think about what was going to come next, she couldn't carry on living in that grotty little room in Weston, or at least she didn't want to. Matt had vacated his room and gone home to live the day before Christmas Eve, apparently his homophobic dad had had a change of heart, so that she was going to have a new housemate sooner rather than later and she would be very lucky to have someone as lovely as Matt to share with again. Her job with Norm could hardly be called a career, so she couldn't stop there forever, but so much was going to depend on what happened on New Year's Eve and how effective the steps Charles had already taken turned out to be.

-OG-

 **Author's notes: Thanks for your reviews and I hope that you enjoy this, which is the penultimate chapter of the story, the last chapter will show that revenge can be very sweet.**


	10. Chapter 10

**Revenge is Sweet**

Charles had put a great deal of time and effort into his plan for revenge.

His father's contacts at the golf club had come up trumps again and Charles had had a long and very fruitful conversation with a criminal psychologist about what makes a stalker tick, although he didn't tell Sean what he needed the information for, he wasn't sure that the other man would find it entirely ethical that Charles was going to use the information to deliver someone, hopefully, a lot of pain.

His very long and confidential chat with Major Beck was something that had to be done, an essential, but it was far too late for any sort of official complaint or action, even though what he'd done to Molly was a crime, and, as Molly had said all along, there was no actual proof. That didn't mean that the army didn't have to be told what a threat he was, and that there were other female soldiers who were probably at risk from him. Charles knew that Beck would make sure that everyone was vigilant, that they would act as soon as there was a hint of anything suspicious, but the fact that there might well be some investigation, sometime, maybe in the future, wasn't nearly enough as far as he was concerned, so Charles didn't tell Beck that by the time he'd finished any females having difficulty would be lining up to shop the little shit, he thought it was best to keep that to himself.

-OG-

She felt as beautiful as Charles kept telling her she was as she walked slowly across the middle of the room to their table, obeying his instructions to let their target get a good look at her. She hadn't been able to spot him in the sea of mess uniforms, so that for a moment a part of her wished more than anything that he wasn't going to be there, that he hadn't turned up, so that she could just enjoy the fact that they were at a party and it was New Year's Eve and that she looked as good as she possibly could and was with someone who not only looked drop dead gorgeous in his mess uniform but who adored her.

She had looked around the room at the light from the chandeliers twinkling off the crystal glasses and the silverware and the white table linen, at all the women like her in long beautiful dresses and the men in mess uniforms and thought what a bleeding far cry it was from the local in east Ham where she'd spent most of the New Year celebrations that she could remember before she'd joined up. Once she was in the army she'd never been on leave at New Year and had, in fact, spent one far away in a FOB in Afghanistan.

"Well, well, well if it isn't Miss Dawes, I hardly recognised you"

"Sir" Molly tried hard to avoid sounding as if she was using the title as a sneer, she didn't want to curl her lip and sound as though she'd just said 'arsehole'. He had taken her by surprise by coming up behind her and hearing his voice so suddenly and without warning had made her jump, as well as filling the pit of her stomach with remembered fear and revulsion.

"Last thing I heard you'd gone AWOL, so I'm surprised about you turning up here, what _are_ you doing here anyway?" he quite deliberately looked her up and down "Not that I'm not pleased to see you back and looking so …. good … because I've certainly missed seeing you around. Still, we can change all that now can't we?"

Anyone listening to their conversation would probably assume that they were old friends or acquaintances who hadn't seen each other for a while, but his voice was absolutely loaded with menace.

"I was invited, and I don't know where you got that I was AWOL, cos I weren't" She forced herself to smile at him as if she was totally unconcerned, although she couldn't be sure that her smile wasn't actually more of a grimace, as she saw Charles give her an almost imperceptible wink as he sat at their table and watched closely what was going on. They were still standing towards the centre of the room and her stalker put his hand on the small of her back trying to guide her off towards the edge, but she stood firm because she knew that the second part of Charles' plan needed them to be as visible to as many people as possible.

"Take yer hand off me" She then raised her voice trying to draw attention to them "Keep yer bleeding hands to yourself"

"Molly" His voice dripped with syrupy sounding sarcasm as though he was completely puzzled at her reaction.

"I never said you could call me Molly neither" Out of the corner of her eye she could see that they were starting to attract quite a lot of attention, that people were looking at them and whispering to each other, obviously talking about them "and I said you was to take yer hand off me"

"Don't be ridiculous I don't need your permission" He laughed as though he was thoroughly enjoying himself.

"I think the lady said to take your hand off her and I think it might be a good idea if you did just that, don't you?" Molly turned and looked into the face of a complete stranger wearing mess uniform and quite obviously a knight in shining armour, which, though lovely of him and it was obvious evidence that Charles' plan was working, was a bit worrying because it might also mean that it was all going to go to shit before he'd had the chance to come over and do his bit.

"We're old friends" He hadn't looked around him as he answered her knight so he probably wasn't aware of the audience there was now to their conversation, so that Molly quite deliberately scanned the room, piquing his curiosity at the same time as drawing his attention to the sheer number of people who were looking at them.

"Yes, I've heard all about your 'friendships' with women" Her knight in shining armour raised his eyebrows and Molly silently swore under her breath, it looked as though the plan might have been a bit too effective.

Sean had underlined for Charles that the one thing the arsehole would hate more than anything else, the thing that he wouldn't be able to cope with, was to be humiliated, to become a laughing stock, the subject of barrack room jokes and derision. Letting him find out that there was gossip in the officers' mess about his fetish for going through female soldiers' underwear and about him being such a total failure with women that he had to follow his subordinates around and chase after them when they were off-duty because they wouldn't voluntarily give him the time of day, would diminish him completely. He needed to see himself and for everyone else to see him as all-powerful.

The Chinese whispers of the army grapevine took some beating as a bush telegraph, but the timing and selection of their unwitting accomplices was crucial, it was vital that no-one knew he was using them to help deliver any sort of comeuppance to anyone and the timing had to be spot on so that the gossip and the jokes were spreading at the time of the party but not so far or so fast that her stalker was already on notice that people were laughing at him. It was important that he wasn't too cautious to approach her in public.

"Everything okay here?" Charles was at his most civilised and superior as he joined the trio in the middle of the floor, a lot earlier than they'd originally planned but it was a sort of damage limitation exercise in reassuring her knight as Charles put his arm round Molly's shoulder and smiled at her would-be rescuer "Thanks very much" The knight walked away reluctantly leaving the three of them together, still looking over his shoulder as he went and then sat down and began talking earnestly to the people sitting at his table, who all looked towards the trio in the centre of the room.

"Who is this darling?" Charles was still using the voice that Molly called his posh twat one.

"It's the one I told you about, you know, the one what kept following me about and wouldn't leave me alone, kept moving me stuff"

"Is it?" Charles' voice was now low, cold and full of menace as he turned and addressed him, drawing himself up to his full height, which was considerably more than the other man, so that he could look down his nose at him as he spoke "What the hell are you doing talking to her, what is it you want? I thought she'd told you long ago to leave her alone but you don't seem to understand, do you? so now I'm telling you to leave her alone"

"She didn't tell me to leave her alone, we were close, I looked after her" he tried to sound both indignant and misunderstood "We were friends"

"Were you?" Charles snorted a sceptical laugh down his nose "We've all heard about the way you make friends with women, and if you were close and you did look after her, she's obviously changed her mind, hasn't she? She's got me to look after her now, and **I'm** telling you to leave her alone" He kissed the side of Molly's head and squeezed her shoulder in an unspoken apology for saying that she needed someone to look after her, which was arrant nonsense.

Sean had explained that stalkers are almost always deeply attracted to women who are feisty and self-motivated which made a lot of sense to Charles, Molly didn't seem to him to have been either weak or vulnerable when he'd targeted her. The fact that he'd expressed his need for power as 'loving' her or being 'in love' with her and that he had fooled himself into believing that those feelings were reciprocated was typical according to Sean, but his emotions had very little or nothing to do with affection, or even sex, they were about his need to dominate and control someone's life through fear, to have power over someone that he saw as powerful.

When he'd asked Sean what effect Molly pissing off would have had, he'd explained that her stalker would have found it unbelievable and infuriating that she'd managed to get way and go missing so that he'd lost her and if she came back into his orbit the man would almost certainly, in his opinion, do anything and everything he could to re-establish that hold over her, that he would need to demonstrate to her that he was the one who was all powerful and that she would only ever be able to escape from him temporarily.

That was why Charles had decided that the best way to punish him was for her to humiliate him and to make him the subject of ridicule. Knowing the army and soldiers, even the officers, as Charles did, he knew that the ridicule would quickly translate into endless piss taking and if there were any girls or women who were being targeted or feeling uncomfortable about him they would be beating a path to report him.

"Come on, darling, let's leave him to it" Charles put his hand in the small of her back and they walked away from the other man, looking every inch a couple as they left him standing alone, isolated in the middle of the room and knowing that the rumour and gossip mill was in overdrive as they took their seats back at their table and completely ignored him as he went back to his own table running the gauntlet of fascinated stares.

"Bugger, I never got the chance to smack his bleeding gob, I were really looking forward to that bit"

"Never mind, I had to stop Sir Galahad, and did I tell you that you look amazing, by the way"

"Yeah, you did tell me, but that don't mean that you can't say it again does it?" She put her hand up and put it on his cheek "Mind, you're a bit biased. You know, I really thought he were gonna whack him one" She giggled "He'd heard all the stuff cos he told buggerlugs over there that he'd heard about the way he treated women"

"Yep, worked a little bit too well though, didn't it?"

-OG-

Her killer heels meant that she was almost tall enough to dance with him without getting a stiff neck, although in the end he pulled her close enough so that her head was resting against his chest and they weren't actually making any progress round the floor at all. The area cleared for dancing was small which meant it was crowded and it didn't matter that they were mostly swaying on the spot. After a while Molly looked around and realised that the man who'd made her life such a misery but who had, in the end, been the reason she'd gone to Bath, had left the party. She supposed she should be grateful to him, if it hadn't been for the way he'd behaved she wouldn't have met Charles, their paths would never have crossed, but she couldn't, she hated him, she would always hate him, even if he was bleeding pathetic.

"Happy New Year" Charles swung her up off her feet so that her face was on a level with his and kissed her, then let her slide down him slowly until her feet were back on the floor.

"Yeah, to you as well, hope it's a bit better than the last one, what with everything"

"What, finding you? Can't come any better than that can it?"

"No, I weren't talking about that; I was talking about you getting shot 'n that"

"That seems like a lifetime ago now and it meant that I met you" He smiled, then kissed her again "Alright it was a bit drastic I'll give you that" He laughed and grabbed her wrist as she went to slap him "Have I told you that I love you tonight?"

"No, you was too busy patting yourself on the back for being so bleeding clever"

"Shall we go and then I can show you?"

-OG-

Their hotel room was very up-market, the bed was so big that it made his bed at Royal Crescent look like a single instead of a king-sized although they were only taking up a tiny bit of it as they held each other as close as they could. Molly kept thinking that there was an awful lot that they didn't know about each other, but as he ran the tips of his fingers up and down her arm, it didn't seem to matter that much anymore.

"One of us is going to have to learn to cook" He laughed "I can only do warming up in the microwave and I need supervision to do that"

"I can do stir fry"

"Can you?"

"Yeah, you put everything in the pan and stir it while you're frying it" She started to giggle.

"You're lying"

"Course I am, dickhead, but I'm bloody good at take away"

"Once of us had better learn to do a bit if we're not going to starve"

She knew that he wanted her to move in with him, that he wanted them to set up home together and she did want to because being without him was unthinkable. She wasn't sure whether or not she wanted to go back in the army any more, but if she did she didn't know what that would mean for them, the problem was that she just didn't know what she wanted to do instead, everything was changing and sometimes it felt as though things were running away from her.

She'd given up her room in Weston and agreed to move back to Royal Crescent for the moment and had then upset Norm very badly by telling him that she wasn't going to be working there after the weekend. He'd kept offering her more money and had even offered to cut her hours as well so that she'd felt very guilty, he'd been so good to her when she needed help so she told him that the only reason was the travelling, that she couldn't commute backwards and forwards to Bath, and had then felt even more guilty for not really telling him the truth.

Sleeping in a giant double king sized bed felt a bit weird, two feet of space between them didn't feel right so that she kept gravitating onto his side so that in the end he'd laughed and said they'd be better off in the middle, so he re-organised the pillows, put his arm round her and asked her to tell him what she was thinking.

"That I don't know what I'm gonna do, whether I wanna go back in or do something else, or what"

"Do you want to be with me? and be honest"

"Yeah, I love you"

"Well that's okay then isn't it? you don't need to decide now, you've got all the time in the world and I've still got a job because I managed not to beat the shit out of an arsehole even if he did deserve it, so we won't starve even if we can't cook. What do you reckon; shall we find somewhere to live so that I get out of barracks and can come home to you at night?"

"Only if it's like Royal Crescent"

"You'll be bloody lucky"

-OG-

 **Author's notes: Thank you for all your support and for your lovely reviews. I had to be very careful not to get carried away with their revenge because it was important that CJ had to keep his career intact and I think he'd be more likely to be subtle than violent in any action he took.**


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